Author Archives: lawofmarkets

Does being inclusive also mean including Christians?

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Israel Folau sacked: Rugby Australia hands down sanction.

“It wasn’t Rugby Australia that put us in this situation. It was Mr Folau that put us in this situation.”

The Waratahs and Wallabies fullback has 72 hours to appeal the ruling with a different three-member RA panel, however, the 30-year-old is reportedly determined to take the dispute directly to the Supreme Court, such is his conviction that he is being wrongly persecuted for expressing his religious beliefs.

“Rugby Australia did not choose to be in this situation, but Rugby Australia is adamant Israel Folau, with his actions, left us with no other choice,’’ Ms Castle said of Folau’s termination because of his controversial social media posts about gays and other so-called “sinners” he believes are destined for hell.

“Our clear message to all rugby fans today is that we need to stand by our values and the qualities of inclusion, passion, integrity, discipline, respect and teamwork,” Ms Castle said.

And that’s just rugby, the most brutal form of football known to man (but few women). This is where things have moved in the US: Pelosi says ‘tolerance’ of LGBTQs is no longer sufficient.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it’s no longer enough for Americans to be “tolerant” of LGBTQs. We must celebrate and take “pride” in this community’s sexual decisions.

For myself, I await the time when movies show LGBTQ love scenes as often as they do the traditional kind. Meanwhile, what should we make of this: Trump on Buttigieg’s Marriage: ‘I Think It’s Great’. Here’s the exact quote:

“I think it’s absolutely fine… I think it’s great. I think it’s something that perhaps some people will have a problem with. I have no problem with it whatsoever. I think it’s good.”

It’s not class warfare, it’s pig ignorance

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The ALP is just daring us to elect them, but if we do, it won’t be as if we weren’t warned: Shorten divides to conquer in class-warfare attacks:

Bill Shorten has intensified his ­attack on retirees, property investors, big business and the wealthy in a speech on the eve of the election, as both sides warned of a tightening contest in an ­implicit message to voters not to deliver the third minority government in Australia in just 10 years.

In a rally cry designed to lock in Labor’s base, with an estimated 10 per cent of voters yet to decide who they will support, the Opposition Leader used his final campaign pitch to a gathering of party faithful to draw even greater contrast between Labor and the “vested interests” of the Liberal Party.

But it was deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek who launched the most strident assault on those she described as “tax dodgers” and multiple homeowners.

“Will it be the big banks and tax dodgers, or teachers and nurses? Will it be people who own six houses already, or young couples buying their first home. Will it be the people who want a refund on tax they haven’t paid, or pensioners who need dental care?

“Who do we want to win the day on Saturday? The sceptics, the deniers, the flat earthers when it comes to climate change or the farmers and the families who want to protect our environment?”

Everyone who rents an apartment, a flat or a house is renting from a “multiple homeowner”. What would either of them know about protecting the environment that anyone living on the land does not already know ten times more than they do? The ALP preys on ignorance and envy and a false sense of fairness. They are the very kind of politician who led Venezuela into the abyss it now finds itself in and from which it may never emerge. Voting ALP is all risk and no gain.

“The worst thing to come from Trump’s presidency”

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If this, as described by CNN, might be the worst thing to come from Trump’s presidency just think how good all the rest of what he has done must be.

When all the fireworks are over in Donald Trump’s presidency, historians may look back and conclude that even more important than the Mueller Report and the American retreat from global leadership was Washington’s disregard of this history and its consequential neglect of the threat to our planet.

There is no denying it, these people are morons of the lowest order.

Going for broke

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Labor began the campaign with a kind of certainty that has now evaporated. And because they felt so certain, they were almost actually truthful about the kinds of things they would do. They would import more voting herds irrespective of the effect on our cities and the economy. They would pursue a green agenda to the very last measure of stupidity. They would waste even more money and more prodigiously than in the past. They believe the millennial vote will outweigh the effect on retirees whose incomes may be savaged.

This is a pivotal election. Either Labor finds there are limits by losing the election when they thought it was all in hand, or they win and become a modern version of Whitlam.

Dim bulbs

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Fresh Chicken Wholebird

 

Tony Abbott

 

 

 

 

 

They really do want to turn out our lights. First Ms Steggles, via Andrew Bolt: TONY ABBOTT IN WAR FOR THE SEAT THAT MOST DECIDES OUR FUTURE.

No wonder Tony Abbott feels hunted. The former prime minister is under savage attack because he holds the most important seat in this election.

So much will change if Abbott loses Warringah on Saturday to global-warming extremist Zali Steggall, the former skiing champion.

Global warming will become our dominant religion, the power of militant activists will soar, Liberal conservatives will be cowed and, given the swing needed, the Liberals will have lost the election.

The country will change. The Liberals will change.

And then there’s this from another within the green-side up brigade: Alex Turnbull teams up with GetUp as the voice of robocalls in key Victorian seats.

Malcolm Turnbull’s son Alex Turnbull has teamed up with left wing activist group GetUp to record robocall messages urging voters in key Victorian seats not to vote Liberal in Saturday’s federal election.

In Liberal backbencher Kevin Andrews’s eastern Melbourne seat of Menzies, voters will be played a radio clip of Alex Turnbull saying the Coalition is in chaos and doesn’t deserve anyone’s vote.

In Health Minister Greg Hunt’s Mornington Peninsula seat of Flinders, a recorded message will be sent to 17,000 voters, featuring Alex Turnbull saying, “we need more people who want action on climate change.”

The apple never falls far from the tree, worms and all.

“For his friends, no explanation was ever necessary; for his enemies, none would ever have sufficed.”

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Conrad Black receives A Full Presidential Pardon. I paid close attention to the case at the time, partly because we are almost contemporaries and even remember him – not personally – from my university days in Canada. Also because Mark Steyn was covering the story so closely. And if ever you have seen an example of injustice meted out by some leftist judge, that was it. This is from his article, up to the moment when the President comes on the line.

The two counts for which I have just received a presidential pardon, and of which I was “convicted” in 2011, after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously vacated them, only to have a self-serving appellate judge reinstate them, were for wire fraud and obstruction of justice.

The alleged fraud was reception of $285,000 in my office in Toronto while I was in England, from our American company, which was approved by independent directors, referred to in public filings of the corporation, but which the company secretary had not completely formalized, in what the trial judge correctly regarded, in the secretary’s case, as a clerical error. The reinvention of this crime enabled the appellate panel—to whom the Supreme Court remanded the vacated counts “to assess the gravity of their own errors”—to resuscitate a count of obstruction of justice against me. This consisted of my removal of boxes of personal papers and material that already had been furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission—which I took out under security cameras I had had installed, with the approval of the acting president of the company and the principal member present of the court-appointed inspector—as I vacated my office of 27 years from a building I chiefly owned, on an unjust local court order of a publicity-seeking judge.

The local jurisdiction found no cause of action nor any violation of a document retention order. I was always presumptively innocent in the initial jurisdiction. It was nonsense, all of it; there was never a word of truth to any of it. And now it is over, after 16 years, including three years and two weeks in U.S. federal prisons.

Only once before, 18 years ago, had I received a telephone call from an incumbent president of the United States, prior to Monday of last week, and I had not spoken to the current president since he took office. When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said “Hello” and started to ask if this was a prank, (suspecting my friends in the British tabloid media), but the caller spoke politely over me: “Please hold for the president,” and two seconds later probably the best known voice in the world said “Is that the great Lord Black?” I said “Mr. President, you do me great honor telephoning me.”

Now do read on. And then this, unrelated in any way to the above other than it is the same person writing: Conrad Black on Democrats Start To Perceive Debacle They Face, being how almost impregnable PDT’s current election prospects are. But of particular interest are Black’s comments on China-US trade.

In the trade dispute with China, where even the Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, sides with the president, the United States cannot lose. China’s tremendous economic progress is based on debt-financed infrastructure, dumping cheap goods abroad, especially in the United States, and requiring industrial-intelligence disclosure from sophisticated foreign companies that seek access to Chinese markets.

Everyone agrees that China cheats and ignores World Trade Organization rulings, and practically every trading nation in the world applauds the U.S. president’s stance in this dispute. Eighty percent of the U.S. GDP is domestic commerce, and with a year to reorient itself, it could practically end all imports. China is a debt-ridden house of cards built on what is still a 40% command economy, rotten with official corruption in a country with few natural resources and 300 million people who still live as their ancestors did a thousand years ago.

One more example showing how centralised economies do not and cannot work. The kinds of things perhaps only those who have run large businesses can really understand.

When doesn’t the left go too far?

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Jordan Peterson: When the left goes too far — the dangerous doctrine of equity

The mantra of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity (DIE) perhaps constitutes the primary identifying factor of the tiny minority of radical collectivist ideologues that nonetheless have come to dominate the humanities and social sciences in Western universities (and, increasingly, the HR departments of corporations). Of these three, equity is the most egregious, self-righteous, historically-ignorant and dangerous. “Equity” is a term designed to signal “equality,” in some manner, and is a term designed to appeal to the natural human tendency toward fairness, but it does not mean the classic equality of the West, which is equality before the law and equality of opportunity.

Equality before the law means that each citizen will be treated fairly by the criminal justice and judicial systems regardless of their status — and that the state recognizes that each individual has an intrinsic value which serves as a limit to state power, and which the polity must respect. There is likely no more fundamental presumption grounding our culture.

Equality of opportunity is a doctrine of openness predicated on the fact that talent is widely distributed although comparatively rare. This should come as no surprise to anyone, given that some people are much better at doing a given task than others and, because of that, it is in everyone’s selfish interest to allow such talent to come to the fore so that we can all benefit. This means that no one should be arbitrarily denied the possibility of their contribution for reasons unrelated to the task at hand. This is also a fundamental principle of Western culture, particularly in its free-market guise.

Equity is a whole different ballgame. It is based on the idea that the only certain measure of “equality” is outcome—educational, social, and occupational. The equity-pushers axiomatically assume that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systematic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) must be at play. This assumption has as its corollary the idea that there are perpetrators (the “privileged,” for current or historical reasons) who are unfair beneficiaries of the system or outright perpetrators of prejudice and who must be identified, limited and punished.

There is simply no excuse for this doctrine.

Whether you read the rest is up to you, but you should.

Did McCain and Romney purposely lose to Obama?

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It’s a thought that has always stayed at the back of my mind but never gone away. McCain was ahead early on, and then decided to put his campaign on hold. Remember this: McCain Suspends Campaign, Shocks Republicans?

The sound of jaws hitting the floor reverberated in Washington this afternoon when Republican presidential nominee John McCain announced that he would suspend his campaign and asked that Friday’s debate be postponed. Why? Because of the “historic crisis in our financial system,” said McCain, who intends to return to Washington tomorrow to participate in Wall Street bailout negotiations on the Hill.

He then selected as his running mate, the untried and untested Governor of Alaska, who no one would have thought would have been much of a political asset, until she was. And then, when she became the sensation of the season, he cut her dead and pushed her away rather than drawing her in. And as Palin said not long ago: Sarah Palin: McCain admitting he’d rather have had Lieberman as running mate was ‘gut punch’.

Speaking with NBC News and the Daily Mail, Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate, talked about her relationship with the Arizona Republican who is battling terminal brain cancer.

McCain’s new book, which chronicles his career and bid for president in 2008, reportedly includes his regret with not choosing Joe Lieberman, then an independent senator from Connecticut, as his running mate in the 2008 race, which he lost to Barack Obama.

McCain writes in the book that advisers counseled him against choosing Lieberman because of his past as a Democrat.

He cuts dead a star in the making and regrets he didn’t choose a Democrat! He really did not want to win.

Then Romney in 2016. Beats Obama pointless in the first debate without even trying. Still almost wins after lying down in the next two debates and is even ahead at the turn when along comes “Superstorm Sandy”. This is his self-assessment seven months after the election:

Among the things Romney thinks might have actually changed the election appears to be his own comments. He repeatedly referenced his own “mistakes” in the CNN interview. He said he “regrets” his comment about 47 percent of Americans refusing to take responsibility for their lives. He said of Clint Eastwood’s empty-chair moment, “Clint didn’t hurt my campaign, I hurt my campaign a couple times.” He said dealing with the press is hard. “Jokes, for instance, will get you in trouble,” Romney said. “Any time you’re trying to be funny.”

But I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until this: Romney casts lone GOP vote against Trump judicial pick because of a ‘disparaging’ comment about Obama.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted to confirm Michael J. Truncale of Texas as the United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Texas by a vote of 49-46.

The vote was mostly along party lines in the upper chamber, with Sens. Cassidy, R-La., Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Hirono, D-Hawaii, Kennedy, R-La., Rounds, R-S.D., not voting; there was, however, one party defection, as Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, voted with Democrats against the nominee.

For Romney, it wasn’t a matter of jurisprudence or legal qualifications, but remarks made about former Democratic President Obama Truncale made in 2011, calling him an “un-American imposter.”

He must be the last man alive on the Republican side not to know that this is absolutely true. And it does make me think he really didn’t want to win the election since he never even came close to taking a hard line on Obama and the horrors of his first four years as president. The comments thread at Instapundit says it all.