Monthly Archives: September 2018

They’re crazy but as they see it only half as crazy as Labor

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The PM, in today’s Oz:

Scott Morrison has said Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target would lead to the closure of every coal-fired power station in Australia.

The Prime Minister said electricity prices were starting to drop and would continue to do so under the government’s policies.

“The alternative is Labor will put into law 45 per cent emissions reduction target, the target we have that has been the commitment of the government for many years now of 26 per cent, that won’t have a material impact on electricity prices, that is my advice,” Mr Morrison told 5AA radio.

“But to take it to 45 per cent would pretty much shut down every coal fired power station in the country, it would increase people’s power bills by about $1400 on average for every single household.”

Meanwhile, from someone self-identifying as the Minister for the Environment, promising to do what cannot be done:

One of my responsibilities as the new Minister for Environment is to ensure Australia remains on track to meet our international commitments.

To be clear on this, Australia will meet our Paris emissions target without compromising the economy. Our approach remains the best way to meet our 2030 target. No country in the world is relying on a single policy. This is the responsible approach to policy, as is reviewing your existing policies to ensure they are meeting your objectives.

The Emissions Reduction Fund — a $2.55 billion investment — is one of the tools we are using to reduce emissions. The ERF has contracted with farmers, landholders and indigenous communities to deliver practical investment in our helping regional communities while reducing emissions.

The message: we are only half as crazy as Labor.

Recollections of youth while examining a judge

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This is the Instapundit post which already has more than 1300 comments. If the right is going to fold every time some woman makes an accusation from decades before, they are not only sensationally vulnerable but fantastically stupid. Not one Democrat believes any of it, but they know some Republicans will or will at least pretend to.

ANITA HILL, REDUX: Kavanaugh Accuser Breaks Anonymity, Is Liberal Professor.

UPDATE: “Here’s what we know”: Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley reacts to new Kavanaugh allegation report. (Bumped).

MORE: Sen. Jeff Flake wants to postpone vote on Brett Kavanaugh; Update: Statement from Sen. Collins.

Plus: Thread: “IF you wanted to detonate an 11th-hr, unfalsifiable smear & strategically leak it for max impact, this is how you’d do it.”

STILL MORE: Thread.


1313Posted at 6:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds 

The most perfect example of fake news in history

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They just lie. Cannot trust a thing they say. And this was “the weather channel”. It is almost a Monty Python level of satire except it was a straight report. Full story here.

AND NOW THIS:

weather man cnn

This censorship must end

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Received a note from a friend, but not a Facebook friend but a real friend since I am not on Facebook. He wrote, in part:

If you are my friend on Facebook, you won’t be seeing me for a month. I have been sin binned – again.

My reply:

Didn’t know you had been “sin binned” at all not to mention that this is well past the first time. Quite a mark of honour in its own way, although part of an extremely dangerous trend. The leaders of industries in the old days ran railroads and steel mills so their personal opinions about anything mattered not at all. Now these morons are at the centre of the information economy and their prejudices and ignorance affects everything. We are definitely in need of some means to fix this up.

Having seen the chap who runs twitter before Congress the other day and then the video of Google’s post-election mass meeting, and knowing what I know about Zuckerberg, it is depressing to see how utterly out of their depth they are on any political or philosophical issue. They really are ignorant to a fantastic extent. They have immense power over the messages that are able to reach us all, and act as gatekeepers to prevent the ones they don’t like from being received.

This should not be tolerated. If anyone any longer really does care about free speech, the ability of “social media” to censor what we say to each other should be stopped dead in its tracks. Google, Twitter, Facebook and others of their kind are supposedly designed to provide a platform for each of us to talk to each other or to learn from each other. The right to stop us from communicating among ourselves is intolerable and must end.

THE CREEPY LINE: It is all coming out as a movie. A big issue with growing momentum.

More at The Creepy Line | Film News. You can also google it here.

This suicidal infighting is a madness

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The Liberal Party left are like the left in general, lacking moral scruples, but with a will to power without a shred of policy sense. It’s not as if Malcolm were doing anything other than leading them to certain defeat on behalf of policies that should almost entirely be the province of the Labor Party. The open borders mentality of the left will almost by itself sink Australia as we know it into oblivion the moment they make it into government. And then there is global warming to push us down even more. But as big a fool as I have always thought of Malcolm, not to mention my disgust at his policy judgement, he was the leader of the non-Labor side of politics and that was that. Criticism of a leader is not seeking to sink the ship but drilling holes in the hull is. With the change of leader, the disgusting disloyalty to party and the party room’s decision by so many among the Liberals is repulsive.

Here are the issues of the moment. Any “Liberal” who finds these hard to accept in public are full-on leftists who found a sinecure in a party on the right but have no understanding of what is required if our way of life is to survive. Here’s a shortlist of what it requires for a party of the right to succeed in today’s political world:

  • strongest imaginable support for closed borders to self-selected migrants
  • defence of Western civilisation and our way of life
  • deep scepticism of man-made global warming as an issue of any substance
  • strong opposition to all efforts to ruin one’s own economy to fix the non-existent AGW non-problem
  • full and unequivocal support for free enterprise and opposition to crony capitalist ventures funded by governments
  • support for a strengthening of national defence against foreign aggression with maintenance of the American alliance the top priority.

A political party is filled with hatreds – diversity is seldom anyone’s strength. If there are policy differences, by all means discuss these and let us hear what they are. But this suicidal infighting is a madness that puts everything at risk

Anti-Semitism is now an integral feature of the left

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Sometimes it is merely called anti-Zionism but there ought to be no mistaking what is taking place for what it is. First this from Caroline Glick.

As for the Palestinians’ supporters on US campuses, the Palestinian exception enabled them to wage a war against American Jews on campuses the likes of which the US has arguably never seen.

Over the years, as antisemitic assaults on Jewish students expanded under the headline of pro-Palestinian activism, Jewish students and groups repeatedly sought redress and corrective action from university authorities. In the many cases where those authorities refused to intervene to protect Jewish students, the students and Jewish advocacy groups turned to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) for protection, but to little or no avail.

In one notable instance, in 2011 the Zionist Organization of America filed a complaint against Rutgers University for failing to protect the civil rights of Jewish students, and the Department of Education rejected their complaint by arguing that it couldn’t prove the assault in question was antisemitic.

That year, a student group named BAKA, (Belief Awareness Kindness Action) organized a campus event that was to be “free and open to the public.” It was titled, “Never Again for Anyone.”

The title of the event made clear that its intent was to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. That is, it was on its face designed to be an antisemitic event.

As the ZOA noted in a statement this week, “When the event organizers saw how many ‘Zionists’ (aka Jews) showed up at the event, they… selectively enforced an admission fee against students who were, or were perceived to be Jewish. Jewish students reported this outrageous and painful and hurtful antisemitic discrimination to the University, which failed to address it.”

Just one instance, you say. Well how about this: Democrats Need Anti-Semites to Win. You should read it all, but here’s a bit that gives you an idea of the whole.

Anti-Semitism does have a home in one of our major parties — the Democratic Party. Obama was the first major Democrat to openly express love and understanding of a blatant anti-Semite, his beloved mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Democratic voters showed they could care less. They desperately wanted Obama to win, to be good, to be great, so they pretended twenty years with an anti-Semitic mentor didn’t matter. It was a pivotal moment for the party. Let us hope, not for American history.

Flash forward, and the Democrats choose a Farrakhan man, Keith Ellison, as number 2 to lead the DNC.  Feminists marched on Washington under the leadership of notorious anti-Semites Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory. Obama did his work well. He is dedicating his very large fortune to training a million more like-minded community organizers.

Obama liked to boast that he had no need for white middle America voters — minority demographics would soon ensure Democrats a permanent one-party state. I recall this when I learn that kindergarten through college, anti-Semitic incidents are off the historical charts, and have been doubling yearly the last few years. Kindergarteners are obviously bringing this from home.

Republicans, and the right in general, lack the will to fight it out

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Here’s a para from a particularly repulsive online article in which Trump is being accused of jeopardising the House and Senate races in November. Its title: There’s No Escaping Trump.

I write at a particularly bad moment for the Trump presidency. His approval has taken a hit from Omarosa, Cohen, Manafort, the McCain funeral, Bob Woodward, and “Anonymous” of the New York Times. Because Trump’s numbers are like a water balloon—they tend always to reflate to the low- to mid-40s—there is the real possibility that he recovers his position by Election Day and the GOP is able to stave off the worst. He pulled it together in the final days of election 2016, barnstorming the country with verve, stamina, and humor. He could do so again.

And just who among the Republicans has defended the president against “Omarosa, Cohen, Manafort, the McCain funeral, Bob Woodward, and ‘Anonymous’ of the New York Times”? These are not scandals. The president has not done something that is hard to defend against. These are nothing but attacks on the president by his enemies. Each of these should be straightforward opportunities to stand up against stupidity and malevolence and to defend Donald Trump.

Any “Republican” who finds these kinds of things hard to oppose in public are closet leftists who found a sinecure in a party on the right but have no understanding of what is required if our way of life is to survive. Here’s a shortlist of what it requires to be on the right in today’s political world:

  • strongest imaginable support for closed borders to self-selected migrants
  • defence of Western culture and our way of life
  • deep scepticism on man-made global warming that is accompanied by the strongest opposition to all efforts to ruin one’s own economy to fix this non-existent problem
  • full and unequivocal support for free enterprise and opposition to crony capitalist ventures funded by governments
  • support for a strengthening of national defence against foreign aggression with a focus on keeping international sea lanes open.

If you are not signed up in full to all of these you are a sellout to the left. All of these are part of PDT’s own agenda. Anyone who calls themselves a Republican for whom these are not part of their agenda needs to explain why.

Going but not quite gone

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This morning The Oz front page was about the PRESENT Prime Minister in communication with the FORMER Prime Minister: PM tells Turnbull: back off. Good, and whether it was “back off” or something similar, that is exactly right. In honour of this moment I have dredged up the post I wrote just after the last election: Australia’s Jonestown massacre. To save you the trouble of going to the link, this is what it said:

Do those political morons who led the coup really believe that the result we have actually had is better than the one we would have had if Tony had still been leader? And listening to the campaign speech delivered six hours after the polls had closed made me appreciate just what a guilty mind Malcolm obviously now has. Other than the brute fact of his steel-plated ego protector, he would have fallen on his sword tonight, instead of telling us what a genius he’d been in destroying a party structure and policy position that had been carefully crafted over those many years of opposition and then in the first year and a half of government. He has also created a Senate eminently workable for a Labor Government but one in which the Coalition will be hard pressed to get a single issue of substance legislated.

The good news is that even with Malcolm leading the party, there is enough sanity left in the country to have kept Labor out. And it does seem possible that we have ended up with exactly the outcome I had hoped for. I wrote a post a week or so back on you don’t have to wait three years and an election cycle (or two). There I suggested:

The strategy has to be to get the Libs over the line and then see Malcolm turfed out before the year comes to an end. Whatever he may think, the Turnbull agenda is comprehensively dead.

The death of Turnbull’s agenda is even more apparent now than it was a week ago. But if the Libs do get over the line – which is more likely than not but by no means certain – he must go. He won’t want to because he never sees the slightest fault in himself in anything he does, but that’s the reality. I don’t know how it should be arranged but arranged it must be. The Party that drank the Turnbull Kool Aid must now find renewal which will not happen until Malcolm is finally gone.

With renewal there is hope. And I am truly pleased to see that the PM has steel in his resolve and understands what needs to be done.

Rebellion comes with consequences

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How a Social Justice Mob Fired a Tenured Professor is a common enough story that is almost no longer visible in the rush of other almost identical processes in campuses around the world. If you actually believe the world is run on ethics rather than my-gang-is-bigger-than-your-gang, you think you can be protected by the hypocritical nonsense they spout. But the reality is that the only rules are the rules of the ruling class and they are the ones who are happy to live in a world of masters and servants. You can enroll in the Master Class but they will discard you at a moment’s notice if you rock their boat. So what happened to tenured Professor Mehta. He took them at their word and so they turfed him out.

He described multiculturalism as a “scam.” Multiculturalism might be described as the official state religion of Canada, and Canadian universities as its schools of theology…. He is accused as well of “denying the wage gap between men and women and dismissing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a vehicle for ‘endless apologies and compensation.’” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a body created in 2008 by the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement to make things right with the native peoples of the country.

Nor was he some peripheral journeyman without a record of academic achievement.

Mehta taught at Acadia for fifteen years; his teaching included large-enrollment introductory courses; he won teaching awards twice; served on numerous committees; remained professionally active in his discipline at the national level, and served local community groups. He was by traditional standards, an exemplary professor.

All was well until:

Mehta’s troubles began, he says, between 2015 and 2017, when he came under the influence of fellow psychologist Jordan Peterson and started to take notice of “protests and cancellations of talks at universities.” In early 2017, his concerns came to a head when he wrote to the search committee that was engaged in looking for Acadia’s next president. He voiced his worry that then-candidate Dr. Ricketts had little to say about “critical thinking or listening to a diverse range of perspectives” and that Ricketts “planned to commit Acadia to social justice.”

Did he seriously think an incoming President would welcome an opportunity to debate his most cherished beliefs? He might have thought tenure would protect him and it should have, but one should never be astonished when it does not. The author of this report believes this is something new. It is the very opposite of new. It is the way of the world and will always be thus.

There’s also a resistance at Google

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Everything below is from Powerline: an extraordinary scandal. Someone has leaked this and it is a lot more damning than anything ever said about PDT. But do remember this, as a commenter at Instapundit has said: “This is what every Government Dept looks like, what every University looks like, what every news room looks like, what every faculty lounge at your kids grade school looks like, etc. This is the result of 5 decades of the Progressive snake slithering into our culture.” And if you watch the video, you will have to get at least as far as the group hug and then go to the one hour point and listen to the last two questions from the horde. What a pathetic lot they are.

IT’S OFFICIAL: GOOGLE IS A DEMOCRATIC PARTY FRONT

Someone leaked to Breitbart an hour-long video of an “all hands” Google meeting that was held just after the 2016 election. The video features Google’s co-founder, Sergei Brin, its CEO, Sundar Pichai, and numerous other high-ranking “Googlers” speaking in turn about the election’s tragic outcome. It is stunning.

All of the speakers express grief over Donald Trump’s election. All of the speakers assume that every Google employee is a Democrat and is stunned and horrified that Hillary Clinton–the worst and most corrupt presidential candidate in modern history–lost. There is much discussion about what Google can do to reverse the benighted world-wide tide exemplified by Brexit and Trump’s election. The insane doctrine of “white privilege” rears its head.

You really have to see it to believe it. Having suffered through the hour-long cri de cœur–OK, to be fair, there is a huge element of schadenfreude, too, and you will relish much of it–you probably will have several reactions: 1) These people may have certain valuable technical skills, but they aren’t very bright and are unusually lacking in self-awareness. 2) It is remarkable that they can achieve such an extraordinary monoculture in an organization with thousands of employees. It must require vigorous enforcement of right-think. 3) It is easy to see how these uniformly left-wing robots/people seamlessly transitioned into Resisting the duly elected Trump administration.

Here is the video, then a final comment:

The question is what to do about the left-wing tech monopolies of Silicon Valley. Start conservative companies and platforms to compete with them? Break them up under the Sherman Act? Turn them into regulated public utilities, with public employee-level salaries and no stock options? Those are all possibilities. After watching the video, you no doubt will be ready to take action.