I came across quite by accident the agenda the Democrats are preparing as they take over the various House Committees. Try as you might, there is not a policy issue to be found.
Those committees will transform into battlegrounds for the Trump presidency in January, once the new Congress is sworn in. As early as Tuesday night, they were previewing their plans to subpoena the president and his aides for his tax returns and for documents on his family business ties overseas. They are likely to investigate the president’s handling of hurricane response in Puerto Rico last year, his policy of separating migrant families at the border and his relationship with Moscow.
They may also examine the president’s payments to Stormy Daniels, a porn star and his alleged mistress before entering the White House, as well as his firing of former FBI Director James Comey. They could look at ethics compliance of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings, at the use of personal email for government business by White House staff, administration-backed voter suppression efforts, and at the politicization of scientific study at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Overall, the future chairs vow to provide checks on the president following two years of a Republican-controlled House that offered little in terms of oversight.
That they feel no need to restrict either open borders or abortion to the final moment before birth is just how it is. Governance is nowhere to be seen, merely a series of irrelevancies whose outcome will make zero difference to how well or how badly America is governed.
This is Peter Hitchens discussing John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism. Lots of points being made. This is one of the many that reading the entire review will bring to your attention:
Perhaps most definitive of all is his observation that godless searches for a universal law are futile. “Without a law giver, what can a universal moral law mean?” he asks. “If you think of morality as part of the natural behaviour of the human animal, you find that humans do not live according to a single moral code. Unless you think one of them has been mandated by God, you must accept the variety of moralities as part of what it means to be human.” Well, exactly. No God: no law. No law: no morals, just situational, alterable ethics. I am amazed that so few seem to realize the implications of atheism for the rule of law over power, the one thing that really sustains human civilization.
Hitchens also provides an insightful quote from Albert Einstein, which he says is not well known which is why he quoted it. It is why I quote it as well.
I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.
I put this up on line back in February 2015 just as Malcolm was about to lead the knifing of Tony Abbott. Title turned out to be wrong – I did vote for him – but the post was extraordinarily mild given what we now know: I would never vote for a Coalition led by Malcolm Turnbull. A few things to keep in mind if you have the strength and fortitude to watch him on Q&A tonight.
Andrew Bolt says that Malcolm Turnbull is about to have his final go at taking over the leadership of the Liberal Party by Tuesday, so that it is now or never to make our views known (see here and here).
When I used to work in Canberra, our offices backed onto the Liberal Party headquarters, and I was asked one time, even before Malcolm entered Parliament, what I thought about him. My answer was that if I was in the constituency that would decide the fate of the next election, and my vote was the one that would put him in or out, that I would hesitate about which way to go. That was then. Today I would have no doubt. The reasons.
Peter Wright For me, national security is the ultimate issue in any election. There are always international issues that matter, and they weigh heavy with me. All but forgotten today, The Spycatcher Trial was one of those moments I do not forget. Wright was an MI5 agent who set out to write a tell-all/reveal-all of the English intelligence service. Margaret Thatcher sought to prevent the publication of his book, and the final determination was in a court in Tasmania, in which Malcolm Turnbull sought to defend Wright and ultimately was successful in allowing the book to be published worldwide because it could be published in Australia. I was told then that everyone deserves the best defence and etc etc, but if Malcolm has ever said that he defended Wright even though he was treasonous scum, I haven’t heard it. I would never trust Turnbull on any national security issue, and there is nothing more important at the present time.
He’s a Warmist Anyone soft-headed enough to take in the Global Warming scam without at least some doubts is not a possessor of the shrewd, sensible, incisive mind I am looking for in a leader. He lost the leadership on this one issue at the time because there are people like me who would never line up behind anyone who believes this stuff needs trillion dollar government solutions to what is looking every day less of a problem.
He’s a Keynesian I once had a conversation with Malcolm over economic issues and mentioned something that I think of instinctively as an issue, the kind of thing Peter Costello put at the centre of his own management of the economy. His response was to walk off. Having watched and listened to him over the years, he has no sense of how an economy works. Given that when he led the Libs he was all set to follow Labor’s lead on the stimulus, and declared that the Coalition would have done much the same, in many ways he owns the problems we have right now.
Useless as a Minister He may be popular with the ABC and others like it, but this is only because he has never done anything of any use that would upset them. If he doesn’t upset the ABC, what could he possibly stand for? What issue has he carried forward as part of the government that has done an ounce of good? If the NBN is his crowning achievement, he has done nothing other than implement Kevin Rudd’s back-of-the-envelope idiocy that will cost us billions and return millions.
He Cannot be Trusted To draw a distinction between himself and the Prime Minister over the Human Rights Commission Report on children in detention not only shows the worst imaginable political judgement, but has him line up with the Government’s enemies. I am a million miles from Canberra right now, but since all and sundry report Turnbull’s treachery, who am I to doubt it. This is a government that needs to survive and win that next election. Abbott is learning how to be a PM on the job, and is actually getting the hang of it. Shame about the wasted first year, but that is now the past.
There is clearly a succession plan in place at the top of the Liberal Party. What may have begun as the second eleven is now starting to function as a very good government. And the PM does not like to lose, and I don’t think he will.
I spent the afternoon in the company of like-minded friends watching the results and these are my first thoughts.
There has been a shift in the momentum away from the #NeverTrump and the Democrats so that there is a clearer ideological path that has been opened for Trump and what he represents. The Democrats have taken the House but for them it will be a double-edged sword. They will be able to make massive nuisances of themselves, and get in the way of the kinds of things PDT wants to do. They will be like a hundred Muellers that will throw their poisoned darts at what has been shown to be an active and very much alive force for the salvation of the American way of life and our own as well. They will have the forum available to them to create damage and harm, but they will also be dealing with someone who knows how to create damage and harm to them.
The media will go on as before, but the novelty of their stupidity and negativism will now be met with a renewed will to resist. The Democrats lost every close contest that mattered, and while some of their more vile members made it through, they have taken a pounding. A party whose most visible relic is Nancy Pelosi, and for whom the new wave consists of far-left fools like Occasio-Cortez, will find it hard to take the actual policy fight up to Donald Trump. The Democrats have nothing to offer other than protection for abortion rights and a life of empty poverty for their welfare-dependent constituency. It is a story that has already gone cold and will look colder still in two years’ time.
It is all in all a disappointing result since it is hard to break through against the entrenched socialist-welfare mentality of the left and their media phalanx. Money-for-nothing is a vote winner for many, but if Trump works out how to explain to those who are footing the bill for these astonishingly expensive forms of government outlay, there is a real possibility that a new coalition of the productive and self-reliant might emerge. That is the hope everywhere. I am not optimistic that our way of life will survive the treasonous efforts of the left, but I at least see a way forward that has been etched out by the election result in the US.
Wish we had had more time to cover the Senate campaign of John James in Michigan, in his uphill battle against incumbent battleaxe Debbie Stabenow. James, a military veteran, has run a spirited campaign, though I don’t think he has received much support from the national GOP.
In any case, above is the voicemail of a newspaper reporter who called James’s campaign office to ask for an interview, but who apparently didn’t disconnect properly, and went on to show how “objective” and “unbiased” she is. Listen to the very end (only a minute long).
Bannon gets to the issue of economic management and the financial elites.
Frum confuses “populism” with “racism”. His entire argument is sickeningly inane. Such a wooden headed fool! A fruitcake. Vile beyond measure. The moderator is no better. I don’t know how Bannon keeps his temper.
Toronto audience, so naturally as boneheaded as Frum. Canadians who voted for Justin Trudeau are the worst possible judges of political sense.
I received a note a week or so back which had as its core message:
I’m hoping you can recommend an event in Sydney where I can share the enjoyment of watching the red tsunami on November 7 with others who “get it”.
I have tried to think about where one might go and have no idea. I know where I am going in Melbourne, but that’s just me and that is here.
If you are in Australia, it will all begin happening starting in the morning of Wednesday 7 November, since the election takes place on the sixth in the US and the results start coming in around 10:00 am our time on the seventh.
And no more than in 2016 can I be sure of who will win. The Senate is likely to shift towards the Republicans but the House is the issue. You do want to be with others of a like mind to watch if you can. How anyone can vote Democrat is beyond me, but seems to be the case, and they may even be half the votes (which is not necessarily the same as half the registered voters).
The different voice that Jordan Peterson provides to the array of criticism of the socialist utopias so many seem to believe an actual possibility, in spite of the universal and disastrous failures every such experiment has created, is that he brings a psychological dimension to the arguments that are an important and in his hands devastating addition to the economic and philosophical arguments that have been more traditional. His has been amongst the most important additions to the criticisms of the left that may have arisen in the present generation. His ability to explain has been recognised in that he has been asked to write The Gulag Archipelago: A New Foreword for the fiftieth anniversary edition commemorating its first publication in 1968. It is a long intro which is worth the time it takes to read it through.
Why, for example, is it still acceptable—and in polite company—to profess the philosophy of a Communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive,” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance (albeit of the most inexcusable kind) that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance—to present it as compassion and care? Or is it, instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth?
Perhaps we simply lack sophistication. Perhaps we just can’t understand. Perhaps our tendency toward compassion is so powerfully necessary in the intimacy of our families and friendships that we cannot contemplate its limitations, its inability to scale, and its propensity to mutate into hatred of the oppressor, rather than allegiance with the oppressed. Perhaps we cannot comprehend the limitations and dangers of the utopian vision given our definite need to contemplate and to strive for a better tomorrow. We certainly don’t seem to imagine, for example, that the hypothesis of some state of future perfection—for example, the truly egalitarian and permanent brotherhood of man—can be used to justify any and all sacrifices whatsoever (the pristine and heavenly end making all conceivable means not only acceptable but morally required). There is simply no price too great to pay in pursuit of the ultimate utopia. (This is particularly true if it is someone else who foots the bill.) And it is clearly the case that we require a future toward which to orient ourselves—to provide meaning in our life, psychologically speaking. It is for that reason we see the same need expressed collectively, on a much larger scale, in the Judeo-Christian vision of the Promised Land, and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. And it is also clearly the case that sacrifice is necessary to bring that desired end state into being. That’s the discovery of the future itself: the necessity to forego instantaneous gratification in the present, to delay, to bargain with fate so that the future can be better; twinned with the necessity to let go, to burn off, to separate wheat from chaff, and to sacrifice what is presently unworthy, so that tomorrow can be better than today. But limits need to be placed around who or what is deemed dispensable.
And when you’ve read the intro you can then watch this.
You have never seen him so angry.
AND THEN THIS: This is Jordan Peterson’s video intro to the book. He states right at the start that writing this introduction is the greatest honour that has been bestowed upon him.
My wife lunched with her two oldest friends where the Pittsburgh shooting came up, and both said that the killer had been pro-Trump. Now I do understand how hard it is for some people to take on board that bad things are done by people who are also anti-Trump, but such is life. But what astonished me was that while the information about Robert Bowers’ deep hatred for Trump was available on the day of the shooting, but only if you looked elsewhere beyond the MSM, finding such stories only a few days later has become almost impossible. I have rounded up a few just for the record, but you should try it yourself. And then try it again a month from now.
I will start with this simply because of its unlikely source. This is from Aljazeera which had this right at the end under the sub-head, “No Trump supporter”:
Bowers also posted anti-Trump rhetoric, calling him a “globalist” and not a “nationalist”, which Trump recently claimed to be. Bowers used an anti-Semitic slur to say that as long as there Jewish people in the US, the country would never be great.
Among his recent posts, Bowers posted a photo of a fiery oven like those used in Nazi concentration camps used to cremate Jews, writing the caption “Make Ovens 1488F Again.” But in other posts he also featured memes containing false conspiracy theories suggesting the Holocaust – in which an estimated 6 million Jews perished – was a hoax.
Another post derided Trump for being “a globalist, not a nationalist” and added that “there is no #MAGA” as long as there is a Jewish “infestation,” using a slur for Jews.
As covered earlier by RedState’s T.LaDuke, the shooter in the horrific attack at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue has been identified as 46-year-old Robert Bowers.
On a roll with implications of last week’s attempted mail bombings, surely, if possible, the Left will attempt to connect the suspected murderer of least 11 to some sort of pro-Trump ideology.
However, film director Robby Starbuck reportedly screencaptured Twitter and Gab posts from Bowers’s social media accounts before they were deleted, and they reveal quite the opposite.
Not only is Bowers rabidly anti-Jewish; he’s anti-Trump.
See below yourself.
And this is what was below.
Posts from the suspected Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers. He hated Trump and thought Trump was controlled by Jews.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 27, 2018
THE suspect who has been charged with murdering 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh slammed Donald Trump in a series of social media rants.
Robert Bowers, 46, said he would “never touch a MAGA hat” and never voted for the US President.
He added on Gab, an alternative for Twitter that is popular with white supremacists: “For the record, I did not vote for him nor have I owned, wore or even touch a maga [Make America Great Again] hat.”
Robert Bowers allegedly opened fire at the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue
Information about suspect and his social media posts emerged after shooting
Bower shared anti-Semitic and anti-Trump posts and revealed his love of guns
11 people were killed and six people, including four police officers, were injured
And this you may know with certainty. Had the killer been pro-Trump, it would never have disappeared from the media which would have been blaring it non-stop since the moment the shooting had ceased. And I should also add that it would make no difference one way or the other who he happened to support at the national level in the United States. He represents the essence of evil. Politicising such murderous insanity is unfortunately itself part of the political insanity of our times.
Law of Markets 