Monthly Archives: October 2020

I’m sure Bruce will like things on Manus Island

Posted on by
1

Talk about undesirable migrants: ‘I’ll see you on the next plane’: Bruce Springsteen says he’ll ‘move to Australia’ if Donald Trump is re-elected – after accusing the president of ‘dividing’ America.

He made the remark – which wasn’t intended to be taken seriously – after sharing his thoughts on Trump’s re-election campaign and its chances of success.

Pop stars now share the same ideology as leading academics, virtually the whole of the public service and most of the media. Lowest common denominator among the generally unproductive, I suppose.

Grifters and crooks, father and son

Posted on by
1

I have been waiting for this to show up in a more prominent way and now it has. The more interesting question is whether it matters. Obviously it does in some sense, since the Friends of the Democrats (ie the mainstream media + social media) have done all they can to prevent any of it becoming an election issue. Still, there is this.

The three tweets are from here: President Trump: Bidens Are ‘Grifters,’ ‘Crooks’. And so they are. But for a Democrat, it does not appear to matter. These people give democracy a bad name.

Apropos of something this being Woody Allen

Posted on by
1

I have just finished Woody Allen’s autobiography, Apropos of Nothing. There have been a number of constants in my life and so far, a love for his movies and his comedy generally has been one of the foremost.

He identifies with the left, but he is a conservative at heart. Everything about his films is representative of the core morality of Western Civilisation. His humour is founded on our Biblical morality. You cannot find anything funny in what he says or writes unless you begin from a solid basis in Biblical morality and the ethics of the West.

I could not recommend his autobiography more.

A $30m contract for three months’ work

Posted on by
1

This is what Daniel Andrews was dealing with. From Peta Credlin: Too much we’re not being told about Victoria’s hotel quarantine fiasco. And while who made the decision is important (here’s the answer, it was Dan), more important to me is why he chose some local mates over the ADF.

The Premier’s chief of staff was the first person Eccles briefed on the national cabinet decision to introduce hotel quarantine. Jobs Department head Simon Phemister then put the process in train that led to the engagement of Unified Security, a company not on the list of preferred tenderers, but that somehow won the lion’s share of the work — a $30m contract for three months’ work…. How could Phemister have set up the private security contracts without knowing how this had come to be authorised? What public servants would spend $30m without being clear about the authority for it?

So many questions, so few answers.

The great coronavirus divide

Posted on by
1

These truly are a spectacular set of differences of attitude. This is a difference between hysterics (Democrats) and stoics (Republicans), and it goes well beyond the coronavirus. I also don’t think the numbers will converge. There is a difference of such profound consequence between the mentality of the left and the right and that difference may never have been better laid out than here.

Suggested by Bruce of Newcastle and taken from Powerline. And this was the “Best” comment there:

In my lifetime the Democrats have assured me that I would be dead from AIDS if I had unprotected relations only once; that I would be dead from Acid Rain; that I would be dead without mandatory seatbelt laws; that I would be dead unless the drinking age was raised to 21; that I would be dead from a nuclear war started by Ronald Reagan; that I would be dead from coastal floods caused by melting polar ice caps; that I would be dead from George W. Bush’s aggressive Middle East policy; that I would be dead from a worldwide famine caused by global warming; that I would be dead without aggressive regulation of the Internet; that I would be dead unless price controls were imposed upon Big Pharma; that I would be dead unless we made up and played nice with Iran; and now that I would be dead unless I stay home most of the time and continually wear a mask.

With this as well:

Thumbnail
Thumbnail

Not to mention this:

Fear is the great motivator on the left. If you vote for a party of the left you really are daft.

Saving Grace

Posted on by
1

I will begin with a single statement: if you do not already subscribe to Quadrant, then you should; it is the best political magazine of conservative thought in the world and I read them all. Subscribe here. Here is only part of the reason why.

Both TAFKAS and myself wrote posts in reaction to a Weekend Australia article by Katrina Grace Kelly: Public safety becomes a casualty to the culture wars. This was his: Safety, and this was mine: Australians watching American politics according to The Oz. To understand what she wrote, I will provide the following from Spartacus:

In her piece this past weekend, titled Public safety becomes a casualty to the culture wars, Kelly writes some “unusual” things.  To start with, it was a very odd mashing of Covid management in Australia, the US and the performance of President Trump.

This aside, it is Kelly’s closing paragraph that got to TAFKAS:

“Voters expect politicians to do everything to keep them safe, and many will vote along these lines.”

I just shortened her argument to, “Save me, she begs, save me.” You get the idea.

Then I turned to my latest October Quadrant which I go through end to end and read through every article that interests me, which most do. But not everything, and this was an article I expected to pass over, titled: The Sea. Turned out it was an investigation of the literature in relation to The Sea as a metaphor of danger. And then in the midst of this wonderful article, there was a passage from The Book of Common Prayer, which brought me back to that pathetic article by Princess Grace:

“O most powerful and glorious Lord God, at whose command the winds blow, and lift up the waves of the sea, and who stillest the rage thereof; We, thy creatures, but miserable sinners, do in this our great distress cry unto thee for help; Save, Lord, or else we perish.”

I am afraid Ms Kelly is a lost soul. She has lost touch with G-d; she can think of no other to save her woebegone self from the dangers of life but the Government. There are many lost souls such as herself who seek salvation in the hands of government from whom no salvation can ever be found. She turns to Joe Biden instead. If it weren’t so tragically sad it might be funny. She is a metaphor for our times.

Australians watching American politics according to The Oz

Posted on by
1

This really is one of the creepiest stories I have come across in the papers in quite a while: Public safety becomes a casualty to the culture wars. It’s by Katrina Grace Kelly and it’s in The Australian.

Confession: it is easy to laugh when on the other side of the world, I suppose, but Donald Trump has been a source of great amusement for many years. However, as the mind-boggling events unfolded this week, the smile was wiped from my dial.

Telling people not to be afraid of COVID-19, which he has contracted — although when and where remains a secret — the President checked out of hospital and returned to the White House.

A day or so later, as the US death toll reached 211,532, reports on television claimed Trump was symptom free and had declared his infection a “blessing in disguise”.

This is her central point:

If the leader of any country has only one job, it is to keep their citizens out of harm’s way. Despite any other previous policy triumphs, if a leader doesn’t do everything to keep their people alive in the face of avoidable death, they won’t be appreciated.

I don’t want to get into just how inane I think this is. If you don’t see it yourself, I can do nothing to help you. But it was the sentence that followed that makes it clear just how much, in Jane Fonda’s words, “Covid is God’s gift to the Left”. Here we have, in The Oz:

Polls often are wrong but they have Trump on track to lose the election. If he does, it will be because of his COVID-19 response.

And it will be just because of this safety-first inanity from people of the left such as herself. Save me, she begs, save me. No one is any longer dying, there are other issues that also matter, and many that are much more important. But so far as she is concerned, that is the first priority with everything else a long way distant behind. Here are the first five comments under “Best Liked” and then a few others after that.

“Voters expect politicians to do everything to keep them safe”. No, we expect them to provide information so we can decide for ourselves how “safe” we want to be. It’s time we recaptured the notion of individual responsibility. The thought of big government nursing me from cradle to grave has me more worried than the virus.

Used to like reading your columns Katrina now they are better suited to the Guardian.

Keeping the population safe includes the responsibility of not destroying the economy.

KGK over the last couple of her articles, has shown herself to be a Dan lover and Trump/right hater/disliker. It’s always good to know the perspective from which the authors come. One thing though for KGK, as a person who will relentlessly defend Dan Andrews and his draconian lockdowns, can she please explain how my child in France was in the very same class with another child who was confirmed to have Covid. The Covid positive child stayed away from school for a few weeks and the rest of the class went on as normal with no one else (nor the teacher) getting Covid (and their classrooms is really, really small and packed with students). Compare this with Victoria where there are very very few diagnosed cases (certainly in comparison to France) but no kids going to school for 6 entire months. KGK, can you see why some people may see that there has been a bit of an over reaction by your man Dan? I think KGK ought to check her bias.

A very simple response Katrina. You’re so very, very wrong in your thinking.

“Telling people not to be afraid of COVID-19, which he has contracted.” Am I the only person in the world who understood his words to be along the lines of not letting yourself become too afraid to live and to still find joy in the world despite the times we are living in; but to take care and be responsible. The man has his faults but for just once could anyone report on his utterances with just a small degree of objectivity?

It is the perpetually terrified who have urged politicians to bring us to our knees. Governments cannot keep us safe. In the ultimate scenario it is they that send troops to die to achieve economic and moral objectives. Safety is am illusion. Live under the doona for as long as you like Katrina but the rest of us want to live life.

This is what gets my back up. People who are so quick to blame Trump for the deaths from corona but yet give a free pass to Dan Andrews. Seriously?? The same bloke who let 10000 BLM protesters run amuck thru Melbourne because apparently they couldn’t be policed but yet dragged a pregnant mother out of her home for supporting a Fb post about a protest. What a joke.

Sorry, but most of this is a string of nonsense cliches.

We can’t hide under the bed forever. I think it is eminently sensible advice to say ‘don’t let this virus rule our lives, we must learn to live with it’.

I swear people still peddling this fear campaign must live under a rock.