Is it The Age or the Oz?

Posted on March 31, 2021 by lawofmarkets

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews appears via video link during a virtual swearing-in ceremony with Scott Morrison on Tuesday. Picture: AAP

I now find reading The Age of a morning in no way politically different than from reading The Oz. Take this bit of nonsense from this morning: Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews promoted after she made my life hell, says female staffer. This mostly looked like a claim for Workers’ Comp but really seems to be just part of the job.

A senior Liberal adviser has taken stress leave from Karen Andrews’ office after claiming the new Home Affairs Minister bullied, humiliated and victimised her over a six-month period.
The complaint, first made by the long-serving female adviser in August and raised again on March 14, has come to light after Ms Andrews was promoted from the industry portfolio by Scott Morrison on Monday in a reshuffle designed to enhance focus on women’s issues.
In a letter sent to Ms Andrews earlier this month, the senior adviser — The Australian has agreed not to name her at her request — claimed the workplace bullying was so significant she was “suffering severe stress, anxiety, sleeplessness and depression”.

And this is woman-on-woman bullying. The story ends:

Ms Andrews was one of six women promoted in the ministerial shake-up on Monday — from industry, science and technology to home affairs — as part of Mr Morrison’s bid to neutralise the Coalition’s sexism row and after weeks of criticism about the government’s handling of rape and sex harassment claims. It increased female representation in cabinet to 30 per cent.
Some senior Liberal figures have privately said Ms Andrews was chosen for the role, above other contenders, such as Stuart Robert — widely considered the frontrunner but who became Employment Minister — in large part because of her gender.
In interviews over the past month, Ms Andrews has been outspoken about the treatment of women in parliament, last week describing the experience for some as “horrendous”.

Hmmmm. And then this: ‘Distractions posing as solutions’: Grace Tame criticises Scott Morrison’s cabinet reshuffle. Ms Tame was apparently Australian of the Year. She writes:

Ms Tame said improving the representation of women in the ministry wouldn’t address the abuses of power. She also accused Senator Stoker of endorsing columnist Bettina Arndt’s “‘fake rape crisis’ tour aimed at falsifying instances of sexual abuse on school and university campuses across Australia” and failing to support victims of sexual assault….

When asked by veteran interviewer Kerry O’Brien on SBS on Tuesday night if Prime Minister Scott Morrison was moved by her words after the awards were announced, Ms Tame paused and said: “moved, in what direction I don’t know”, to huge applause from the audience.

OK, which story was from which paper? If you don’t already know, I bet you couldn’t tell. As for management of our public affairs, what any of this has to do with anything is still to be revealed, although I was happy to see Peter Dutton moved over to Foreign Affairs.

The tragedy that so little is said and known about the many many failures of the left

Posted on March 30, 2021 by lawofmarkets

Growing up at nice lefty, wildly expensive private schools, I learned history as a series of progressive triumphs over conservative intolerance.
It made me happy to know that was how the world unfolded. It made me happy to know I’d be on the righteous side. It made me happy to know that the good team would win out. Each day is better than the last, and the path forward is always clear.
Religious schooling does not impart that message. It can’t. The Bible’s myths are all about chaos and complexity, sin and redemption, destruction and forgiveness, cowardice and courage, idiocy, luck.
To instill blissful confidence in me, the educational system had to downplay or ignore leftist failure. Secular, liberal Americans like me are taught a very beautiful and simple myth. It goes a little like: every progressive program that has failed or caused suffering didn’t do so because of some flaw in the plan or some misunderstanding of human nature. It failed because of forces on the wrong side of history.
This is how the system popped me out, at 22 years old, with only the vaguest knowledge of why the Soviet Union was a disaster. I had absolutely zero awareness that Jews there had any issue at all. If any of this was taught, it was fast and light enough to scuttle across my mind without leaving a mark.
My ignorance hit me hard in my Jewish 101 class, where one student was the daughter of Russian Jews, but she knew very little about Judaism from her family. I had no idea Judaism has been illegal there, that the rituals and the community had been pressured for generations to erase all traces of religiosity, all traces of difference, any part of themselves that might be Jewish. I’d never heard about any of that.

—“Why Do I Know Nothing About the Soviet Union?”, Nellie Bowles, Substack, Thursday.

Another troublesome fact has cropped up, gravely complicating the longtime dream of socialism. That troublesome fact may be best summed up in a name: Solzhenitsyn.

With the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 it had become clear to Mannerist Marxists such as Sartre that the Soviet Union was now an embarrassment. The fault, however, as tout le monde knew, was not with socialism but with Stalinism. Stalin was a madman and had taken socialism on a wrong turn. (Mistakes happen.) Solzhenitsyn began speaking out as a dissident inside the Soviet Union in 1967. His complaints, his revelations, his struggles with Soviet authorities—they merely underscored just how wrong the Stalinist turn had been.
The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to concentration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had immediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.

—Tom Wolfe, “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America,” 1976.

From Instapundit.

My advice, for what it’s worth, to anyone under thirty

Posted on March 30, 2021 by lawofmarkets

The one spokesperson from the Libs who I find myself listening to most closely when I see her on the tele is the Liberal Party’s federal vice-president, Teena McQueen. Balanced and sensible and most impressively calm in what she says and goes about doing. I love her name as well. And there she was in today’s Age with this the headline: ‘I would kill to be sexually harassed at the moment’: Liberal Teena McQueen stuns colleagues in closed door meeting.

The Liberal Party’s federal vice-president, Teena McQueen, said “I would kill to be sexually harassed at the moment” according to three senior Liberal women who joined her at a meeting to discuss the NSW branch’s new code of conduct.
And Ms McQueen, who says she did not make this exact comment, has apologised for an attempt at humour about herself.
Ms McQueen said she “made a throwaway line, that ‘when women reach my age, we don’t have to worry about being sexually assaulted’,” during the meeting.

I see the joke but worry about not one, not two, but THREE senior Liberal women who reported this remark to the Fairfax Press. What a sorry bunch of twits seem to be advising Ms McQueen. The story continues:

The executive voted later that evening to adopt a new code of conduct that makes clear the party has zero tolerance for bullying, sexual harassment, vilification, physical violence and discrimination.

Of course it does, as it always did and always will. We really do live in an Age of Stupidity! And let me provide a piece of advice from Jordan Peterson from his astonishingly excellent Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

In our culture, we live as if we are going to die at thirty. But we do not. We live a very long time, but it is also over in a flash, and it should be that you have accomplished what human beings accomplish when they live a full life, and marriage and children and grandchildren and all the trouble and heartbreak that accompanies all of that is far more than half a life. Miss it at your great peril. [p. 283]

It is annoying to find the media and the left [I know, the same thing] fixating on fixing what no Parliament can repair – boy-girl relations in the age of of online porn and Sex and the City:

Criticism has been expressed about the influence the show has on adolescents and how the images displayed on the show affect the way women and young girls view themselves.
Tanya Gold of The Daily Telegraph stated, “Sex and the City is to feminism what sugar is to dental care. The first clue is in the opening credits of the television show. Carrie is standing in a New York street in a ballet skirt, the sort that toddlers wear. She is dressed, unmistakably, as a child. And, because she is sex columnist on a newspaper, a bus wearing a huge photo of her in a tiny dress trundles past. ‘Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex,’ says the bus. And there, before any dialogue hits your ears, you have the two woeful female archetypes that Sex and the City loves—woman as sex object and woman as child … In another [episode], Carrie realizes she is homeless because she has spent $40,000 on shoes and does not have a deposit for an apartment. (In this crisis, she cries and borrows the money for the deposit—what child would do anything else?).

My advice, for what it’s worth to anyone under thirty, is that they should read Jordan Peterson and straighten out their own lives by themselves. If you are taking your cues from Carrie Bradshaw you will find yourself adrift with almost no way home after that.

“If you didn’t have a TV or a smart phone and didn’t hear any news, would you feel like you were living through a pandemic?”

Posted on March 29, 2021 by lawofmarkets

I just thought that was because we are in Australia, but the question is not from an Australian source. It’s from this: What do you really know about the COVID Vaccine? There’s plenty more at the link which you should go to, including the interview above. However, this should on its own make you think.

Doctors and scientists from around the world are organizing, doing interviews, holding press conferences, suing their governments and doing all they can to expose the lies about COVID19, to reveal several effective treatments and to warn about the dangers of an untested “vaccine.” They are being suppressed, censored, targeted and maligned. Many point out that it is not really a vaccine by scientific definition. It is a new technology using messenger RNA that actually re-writes your human DNA. There has NEVER been a successful mRNA vaccine though they have attempted for 20 years to create one. In every case, animal trials were done and when the animals were later exposed to the virus they had a severe auto-immune reaction where their immune systems attacked their own cells and organs. There was a very high percentage of death. The COVID19 vaccine was rolled out prior to “FDA Approval.” It was only “allowed” due to an “emergency” based on the lie that no other effective treatments existed. By their own guidelines, an untested treatment may be used for “an emergency” if no other treatment exists.

The clinical trials for this mRNA COVID “vaccine” are not scheduled to be completed until 2023.

Health care professionals have shown that known, simple, inexpensive and extremely effective treatments are being used successfully and they are being censored. Furthermore, we are being told that even after “vaccination” we must still wear masks, practice social distancing and maintain lockdowns.

Does this really make any sense to anybody?

Which ends with the question asked as the title of the post. But there’s more, as I say, so go to the link! Especially this on Total Deaths in the US per Year by All Causes.

Covid Deaths Graph

fyi

Posted on March 29, 2021 by lawofmarkets

Who can say if any of this will really happen? What can be said is that there is no reason to be certain it couldn’t. We are pumping out money incomes across the world to people who are not producing anything. We have pushed our economies into recession as an act of policy. Value adding linkages are being broken at every turn. And the thing about recessions and crashes is that they are never seen before they happen other than by a handful of speculators who manage to clean up while everyone else goes broke. Just like in the Global Financial Crisis.

Woody and Mia

Posted on March 29, 2021 by lawofmarkets

I had offered to review Woody Allen’s autobiography for Quadrant but thankfully I was beaten to it by Rob Long in this wonderful piece in the March issue: In Search of Woody Allen (and if you’re not a subscriber to Quadrant, you should be). If I had written the review, however, this is the kind of thing I would have said: Woody Allen is the greatest comic movie writer-director-producer alive today, our own Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. He is also a socialist-Democrat of the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama variety, so from a personal political perspective he is poison. But oddly and pleasantly, very little of that shows up in his films. In fact, if anything, his movies are almost completely conservative from a plot perspective. Whatever you might think of Annie Hall as a film, to the extent there is a moral to the story, it is hardly about socialism and share the wealth. It is about the complexity of human life.

But that is not why Allen is being brought to our attention today. This being the era of the wronged woman, he has fallen foul of the cancel-culture thought police. Woody, while boy-friending Mia Farrow (they never married or even lived together) is accused of molesting his adopted daughter, Dylan, when she was seven. These accusations were made after Allen began an intimate relationship with another of Mia Farrow’s adopted children, Soon-Yi, who was at the time 21. These are the details of their association according to Woody Allen’s Wikipedia page:

Allen and Mia Farrow met in 1979 and began a relationship in 1980; Farrow starred in 13 of Allen’s films from 1982 to 1992. Throughout the relationship they lived in separate apartments on opposite sides of Central Park in Manhattan. Farrow had seven children when they met: three biological sons from her marriage to composer André Previn, three adopted girls (two Vietnamese and one South Korean, Soon-Yi Previn), and an adopted South Korean boy, Moses Farrow.

In 1984 she and Allen tried to conceive a child together; Allen agreed to this on the understanding that he need not be involved in the child’s care. When the effort to get pregnant failed, Farrow adopted a baby girl, Dylan Farrow, in July 1985. Allen was not involved in the adoption, but when Dylan arrived he assumed a parental role toward her and began spending more time in Farrow’s home. On December 19, 1987, Farrow gave birth to their son Satchel Farrow (later known as Ronan Farrow). According to Allen, his intimate relationship with Mia Farrow ceased completely after Satchel’s birth and he was asked to return her apartment key; they maintained a working relationship when they filmed a movie, and he regularly visited Moses, Dylan and Satchel, but he and Mia were only “social companions on those occasions where there’d be a dinner, an event, but after the event she’d go home and I’d go home.” In 1991 Farrow wanted to adopt another child. According to a 1993 custody hearing, Allen told her he would not object to another adoption so long as she would agree to his adoption of Dylan and Moses; that adoption was finalized in December 1991. Eric Lax, Allen’s biographer, wrote in The New York Times that Allen was “there before they [the children] wake up in the morning, he sees them during the day and he helps put them to bed at night”.

Whatever you may think of his taking up with Soon-Yi, and they have now been married for a quarter of a century and have two adult adopted daughters, the issue is Mia’s accusation brought into living rooms across America by that four-part series on HBO. You can either think Mia is telling the truth, or that she is a madly deranged woman out for revenge. So clear is it to me (and Rob Long) that it is Mia who is a madwoman beyond sense that I can only watch in sadness and wonder as the events unfold. Weirdly, it is the left in America that has ganged up on Allen, with only someone such as myself even game to defend him. Read ‘Allen v. Farrow’: Intellectually Dishonest Propaganda Meets Emotional Blackmail for the Woody Allen side of the story. It’s long, but not as long, nor as wildly entertaining as Woody’s autobiography, Apropos of Nothing. From the book, what I got was that while he is astonishingly funny, he is not very bright and generally anti-social. But of this particular crime, he is completely innocent. He must have been a nightmare to teach – class clown material at its worst – but also no scholar, as he readily admits time and again in the book.

As for our taste in movies, at least so far as his films are concerned, there was this from his autobiography:

To me, my most disappointing film was Hollywood Ending. I felt that movie was funny and it did not do well. I executed it well, my leading lady Téa Leoni was wonderful, the supporting cast came through, the idea was fraught with potential. A film director goes psychosomatically blind and, unwilling to lose a chance to direct a comeback film, fakes his way through, pretending he can see. In Chaplin’s hands, or Buster Keaton’s it would’ve been a masterpiece. Even in mine, it was funny – or so I keep telling people. (pp. 342-343)

And so I also keep telling people. See it if you can. As for this Allen-Farrow dustup, it’s Hollywood and it’s decadent but what’s new? Woody didn’t do what Mia says, so as sordid as the story is as she tells it, it is irrelevant to anything and to anyone other than themselves. But similar to Ovid being sent into exile by Augustus, the world is being denied a comic genius, and that is not good.

“The time for excuses has passed”

Posted on March 29, 2021 by lawofmarkets

From Pepé Le Pew Apologizes:

Messieurs and mesdemoiselles, bonsoir! It is good to see so many attractive journalists here today. I would like to make love to each and every one of you! Ha ha! Oui, oui—my representatives are telling me not to get distracted. Is good advice, non? This is my problem! I have too much amour, non? Anyway, I have come before you today to make an apology.

Questions have been raised about some of my past interactions with cats and dogs whom I perceived to be highly attractive lady skunks. I never intended to offend anyone or cause any harm. It was all about the amour, non? But, still, my actions are not—how do you say—appropriate. Pepé is très sorry.

It would be easy to blame my behavior on having been insulated by privilege—the privilege of being a well-known celebrity skunk. But I will not do this. It would also be so easy to make some excuse. Like, other skunks have engaged in disreputable behavior for decades without getting caught. Or, only a few unreliable cats and dogs have complained, and they can’t even talk. And, yes, it would be très facile to cast the blame on others, like the painters who are always so sloppy with their painting, leading to white stripes down the backs of black cats and much, much confusion. Mon Dieu, why is it always white paint?

But Pepé knows that the time for excuses has passed.

From The New Yorker! Have the looney left gone too far even for their own? Probably not, but these people are nuts.

Living, as we do, in the best of times

Posted on March 29, 2021 by lawofmarkets

Unfortunately you have to already be able to see what this is saying to see it, but there you are. But watch it through, if for no other reason than to see Joe Biden say (at 3:55):