Category Archives: Cultural

Left bots get their news from comedians which is why they are so ignorant

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Is Comey a bad guy – he stopped Hillary from becoming president – or is he a good guy – investigating Trump’s Russian connection? Expect not honesty, consistency or common sense from the left who get their lead from comedians. Politics on the left is just a fashion statement. This is a paradigm example of how the left instantly falls into line with whatever is supposed to be the politically correct response to any event. This is from Twitchy: BACKFIRE alert! Audience reaction to Comey firing NOT what Stephen Colbert wanted.

On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert broke the news to his audience that Donald Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey, and their reaction was not what he hoped for.

Dems have gone back and forth on Comey so much even Colbert’s fans are unsure how they’re supposed to react on any given day.

Almost exactly the same from the Puffington Host even, also picked up by Twitchy: BACKFIRE alert! Audience reaction to Comey firing NOT what Stephen Colbert wanted.

Stephen Colbert opened his Tuesday night “Late Show” with the news that President Donald Trump had abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey.

The audience immediately started to clap and cheer at the news, leading Colbert to quip that there were “huge Donald Trump fans here tonight.”

Colbert’s guest on the show, Jon Stewart, later discussed the audience’s bizarre reaction to the Comey news.

Within minutes the entire left knew its lines and how to act in unison by following their national socialist leaders. This example from history shows how it was done then as it still is.

And the words – via the voice-over translator – are uncanny in their opposition to democracy, liberty and free speech.

A COUPLE OF ADDITIONS: The left remains a mystery in their self-destructive ways. Two examples worth your time. The first from Ann Coulter: TO SAY, ‘STOP RAPING ME!’ IN ENGLISH, PRESS ‘1’ NOW. The second from QoL: Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech. This is an historic first, where a civilisation has disintegrated because its inhabitants hated its own values. I hope these cretins like what comes next better than what they are helping to see off, but my guess is they won’t. But their offspring will not know any better so in a hundred years no one will understand how pleasant our way of life was since no one will be able to believe we had what we had and gave it all away.

Politically ravaged marriages it’s worse than ever

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From Fights over Trump drive couples, especially millennials, to split up.

Couples are fighting over President Trump more than ever, and many are turning to divorce court to get out of their politically ravaged marriages.

New data from Wakefield Research found that one in 10 couples, married and not, have ended their relationships in a battle over political differences. For younger millennials, it’s 22 percent.

And nearly one in three Americans said that political clashes over Trump have “had a negative impact on their relationship,” said the report provided to Secrets.

Not sure I could have lasted eight years with an Obama person, or would mind living my own life free from one of Hillary’s cretinous minions.

PhD gender weighting

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Throwing a bit of light on a very vexed issue. The data and the subsequent quote are both from “What’s Your Major”: Another Blow to the So-Called Gender Pay Gap.

Ph.D. Fields of Study With the Highest Gender Weighting

“Most Female”                             “Most Male”
Art History                           Aerospace Engineering
Psychology                          Mechanical Engineering
French                                 Electrical Engineering
Comparative Literature               Physics
Sociology                                Computer Science

The study goes further and lists which fields of study tend to be “most male” or “most female,” meaning fields in which the gender imbalance is the greatest. One must have lived under a rock not to know that so-called “STEM” fields are in great demand and pay well in the marketplace. Lo and behold, all of the “most male” fields of doctoral study are in the STEM fields, including Aerospace Engineering, Mathematical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science. . . .

Ignoring how fields of study differ by gender is only one problem with the supposed 20% gender pay gap. The 20% figure ignores that men tend to work longer hours, to have more years of work experience, and to work in jobs that are more physically and financially risky than women. After accounting for these factors the unexplained portion of gender pay differences – the part that could potentially be explained by discrimination — shrinks significantly. Factoring in differences in fields of study, which exist not only at the Ph.D. level but in undergraduate and Master’s-level education as well, would shrink the potential range of gender discrimination even further.

Know thine enemy

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There is something so pathetically inane among the supposed right side of the political spectrum that I am at a loss to understand how to get others to see what is right before their eyes. The left knows its own. They can tell from the phrases they all use, their uniformity of perspective on every issue, their inability to reason and make sense of a contrary argument, that they are part of that side of the political world. The comments on my post on John Brennan dealing with Guess who was “a supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War” has led me to put up this post as a response.

The first of these comments is just empty rhetoric from some Democrat/Hillary troll (however he might deny it) and is hardly worth a moment’s thought. But given that I had been on the left in my youth, one of the many things I have learned is that the most perfect dye-marker of someone who no longer has those views is that they never leave anyone in doubt about the ways their political beliefs have changed by their unrelenting criticisms of the left. Brennan has never said a word to indicate he has changed his political beliefs and was appointed by Obama! If you think he was ideologically a different man in 2013 than he was in 1976, when he could not even bring himself to vote for Carter for heaven’s sake, you really ought to rethink these things again.

This comment is purely incoherent:

You can’t have it both ways Kates. On one hand you are complaining that a pinko ran the CIA. On the other you defend Trump’s assertions that Putin’s Russia is no worse than the USA! Make up your mind (if that’s at all possible).

These others, however, make a valid point, I suppose, but seem to be merely a preference to do nothing even as a three-alarm fire is raging right before them. Those asking that we investigate further whether the beliefs that John Brennan hold have changed in a more benign direction are, I’m afraid, forms of rhetorical junk. What genuine point do they make unless they have some reason to think that if we spent time and effort looking more closely at Brennan’s current views that there is something else we might find?

Christopher Hitchens was a Trotskyist around the same time.

Steve do you agree with what you thought in 1976?

The traffic from left to right is very thin. With no exception I can think of, all of the people I associated with in my student days have not changed their politics in any way other than to follow whatever the modern fashion might be. To remain friends, we just have to stay off certain topics, which is all right since I see them only every year or so at the most. I have a friend from my university days who went on to become Vice-President of a major Canadian insurance company, but when he retired he immediately went back to overtly expressing the political beliefs of his (and my) youth, beginning his instant return to the far left by reading every Chomsky book he could find. No doubt almost every corporate boardroom has imbeciles just like him. There is no country that would not be turned into Venezuela if these people had their way. They are as unable to understand the workings of a free market as they are to understand how hydrogen and oxygen turn into water.

If after eight years you still want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, and John Brennan along with him, I cannot think what can be done to make you see how you are playing into the hands of the left assuming you are not actually part of the left already. And to be quite honest, I am anyway unable to distinguish you from these leftist loons, although I am willing to hear in what way I may be wrong.

Which American president does this remind you of?

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Other than his being an introvert, that is. From introverts tend to be better CEOs — and other surprising traits of top-performing executives:

So what did make CEOs successful? After analyzing all of their data, the researchers found that roughly half of the candidates earning an overall ‘A’ rating in their database, when evaluated for a CEO job, had distinguished themselves in more than one of four management traits. (Only five percent of the weakest performers, meanwhile, had done the same.) The four were: reaching out to stakeholders; being highly adaptable to change; being reliable and predictable rather than showing exceptional, and perhaps not repeatable, performance; and making fast decisions with conviction, if not necessarily perfect ones.

Indeed, that last trait — a willingness to make a call quickly, even without all the needed information — was one of the four “essentials” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, detailed in his own letter to shareholders last week. Calling it “high-velocity decision-making,” Bezos wrote that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” Being wrong isn’t always so bad, he wrote. “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

Botelho agreed that first trait was the most surprising. “We frankly expected to find that strong CEOs stood out for the quality of their decisions — that they turn out to be right more frequently,” she said. “But what very clearly stood out was the speed. Quality was likely something they developed earlier, but then they’re willing to step up and make the decision faster, even with more uncertainty.”

Finding yourself right most of the time gives the confidence to keep making those decisions, and allows others to to defer to your decision-making when everything is so entirely opaque. It’s like the question Napoleon used to ask his generals: do you think of yourself as lucky. For those where things turned out as they had hoped, it would often have looked as if it had been little more than luck. But the better judgement you have, as they say, the luckier you become.

Cross Post: Jim Rose When two refugees from the Khmer Rouge found paradise on Earth

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Read the article to the end because it goes in a very different direction from how you might have expected from the way it begins.
__________

When a Cambodian man and his pregnant wife, having fled the Khmer Rouge, were on the bus from Sydney Airport, they quickly concluded that they were in paradise. They slept on top of the blankets of the neatly made bed at the migrant hostel in 1978 because they did not want to get into any trouble for messing up the bed and be sent back to hell. Such was their ingrained fear of arbitrary power and victimisation.

After a few weeks, they stopped stealing the sauces and other condiments from the dining hall at the hostel because they realised that the food would keep coming and there was no need to hoard. They then started to act as mentors to incoming refugees assuring them that they could sleep under the blankets, and the food would arrive three times a day, every day.

When the Salvation Army helped them and their new baby into a house in suburban Sydney, the Salvos were very embarrassed about the furniture they managed to find for them.

The Cambodian couple thought they were in paradise again. The house and furniture were better than anything they had seen in a middle-class home in their own country.

After a few years of hard work, the father saved enough to open an electrical retailing franchise store in the suburbs.

The mother went to the store one afternoon to fill in for an absent worker.

She did not come back for 7-years.

She was great at bargaining with fellow refugees. She knew that her fellow refugees only had a certain amount of money, and she bargained to find out what that was. She wrapped the goods up tightly because she knew that they took public transport home.

The word spread that her store was a good place for a bargain, and the store prospered.

Their daughter grew up to be a lawyer and wrote one of the best autobiographies I have read.

I had some Cambodian friends at graduate school in Japan in 1995 to 1997. Friendly, kind people despite growing up in hell.

They also gave me great insight into the blinding power of nationalism.

Two Cambodian friends, educated urbane people, referred to the time after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as when they were a Vietnamese colony.

Another Cambodian, who no one liked, when he annoyed his Vietnamese class mates too much, they would say, “Remember 1979.”

This taunt would throw this Cambodian into a fit of nationalist pique. He raged against the invasion.

If any country would have benefited from an invasion from hell, it would have been Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by 1979. At least, the Devil waits for you to die before he torments you.

Original posted here

Discourses on the Election of Donald Trump

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It may be absurd but this is how I look upon my The Art of the Impossible, my blog history of the election of DJT as president. You can order a copy here. The discourse were, of course, written by Niccolo Machiavelli. I naturally say “of course” in recognition to the fullest extent of its ironical intent. Our educated classes are the shallowest political generation in history.

DISCOURSES ON THE FIRST DECADE OF
TITUS LIVIUS.
BOOK I.
* * * * *
PREFACE.

Albeit the jealous temper of mankind, ever more disposed to censure than to praise the work of others, has constantly made the pursuit of new methods and systems no less perilous than the search after unknown lands and seas; nevertheless, prompted by that desire which nature has implanted in me, fearlessly to undertake whatsoever I think offers a common benefit to all, I enter on a path which, being hitherto untrodden by any, though it involve me in trouble and fatigue, may yet win me thanks from those who judge my efforts in a friendly spirit. And although my feeble discernment, my slender experience of current affairs, and imperfect knowledge of ancient events, render these efforts of mine defective and of no great utility, they may at least open the way to some other, who, with better parts and sounder reasoning and judgment, shall carry out my design; whereby, if I gain no credit, at all events I ought to incur no blame.

When I see antiquity held in such reverence, that to omit other instances, the mere fragment of some ancient statue is often bought at a great price, in order that the purchaser may keep it by him to adorn his house, or to have it copied by those who take delight in this art; and how these, again, strive with all their skill to imitate it in their various works; and when, on the other hand, I find those noble labours which history shows to have been wrought on behalf of the monarchies and republics of old times, by kings, captains, citizens, lawgivers, and others who have toiled for the good of their country, rather admired than followed, nay, so absolutely renounced by every one that not a trace of that antique worth is now left among us, I cannot but at
once marvel and grieve; at this inconsistency; and all the more because I perceive that, in civil disputes between citizens, and in the bodily disorders into which men fall, recourse is always had to the decisions and remedies, pronounced or prescribed by the ancients.

For the civil law is no more than the opinions delivered by the ancient jurisconsults, which, being reduced to a system, teach the jurisconsults of our own times how to determine; while the healing art is simply the recorded experience of the old physicians, on which our modern physicians found their practice. And yet, in giving laws to a commonwealth, in maintaining States and governing kingdoms, in organizing armies and conducting wars, in dealing with subject nations, and in extending a State’s dominions, we find no prince, no republic, no captain, and no citizen who resorts to the example of the ancients.

This I persuade myself is due, not so much to the feebleness to which the present methods of education have brought the world, or to the injury which a pervading apathy has wrought in many provinces and cities of Christendom, as to the want of a right intelligence of History, which renders men incapable in reading it to extract its true meaning or to relish its flavour. Whence it happens that by far the greater number of those who read History, take pleasure in following the variety of incidents which it presents, without a thought to imitate them; judging such imitation to be not only difficult but impossible; as though the heavens, the sun, the elements, and man himself were no longer the same as they formerly were as regards motion, order, and power.

Desiring to rescue men from this error, I have thought fit to note down with respect to all those books of Titus Livius which have escaped the malignity of Time, whatever seems to me essential to a right understanding of ancient and modern affairs; so that any who shall read these remarks of mine, may reap from them that profit for the sake of which a knowledge of History is to be sought. And although the task be arduous, still, with the help of those at whose instance I assumed the burthen, I hope to carry it forward so far, that another shall have no long way to go to bring it to its destination.

“We need to push back against this rubbish”

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No namby-pamby PC.

From the accompanying note that came with the vid:

Today we are launching the website: www.marklathamsoutsiders.com

Have a look at the site: hopefully it will become a handy resource for folks wanting to fight back against the loss of our institutions and Australian values.

I genuinely believe conservatives and social democrats need to unite in the fight against cultural Marxism and segregationist identity politics.

The best things about our country, many of which we had taken for granted, are now at risk.

many thanks, Mark

Just war and spontaneous order

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An interesting and very timely article on Rules of Warfare in Pre-Modern Societies. In the wake of Trump’s attack on the Syrians over their use of poison gas, with all the risks involved, apparently has ancient roots and is founded on keeping even the mayhem of war within bounds. From the article:

How have rules of war been maintained throughout history without a central enforcing agency? This question is fundamental to the understanding of the nation-state in IR theory, and is also an astonishing example of spontaneous order in an anarchic and chaotic scenario.

The quandary exists because even the laudable negative rights of life, liberty, and property ownership, as Eric Mack discusses in his essay on Just War Theory, require a positive enforcement by others. Similarly, “rules of war” – such as refraining from attacking non-regulars, not attacking neutral parties, abiding by the terms of treaties, treating prisoners of war with respect, etc. – are, theoretically, difficult to establish and dependent on positive enforcement. This is because if Party A respects these rules, they provide a perverse incentive to Party B to take advantage of Party A’s restraint, and if doing so gives Party B the upper hand, they can enjoy the benefits of betraying the rules of war with impunity. This is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, and if it generalized across many nations, the theory of rational choice would lead us to expect a coordination problem, in which those using the strategy of Party B would dominate the Party A’s.

Seems, however, not. If these things interest you, and I cannot see why they wouldn’t, you should go to the link.

“I stand with Mark Latham and I want him back”

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The words in the heading are Ross Cameron’s from yesterday’s Outsiders and let me say the same for myself, I stand with Mark Latham and I want him back. Sky News has to understand that they are responsible for what is wonton destruction of possibly the best political satire and commentary we have seen in years. The management team at Sky are to Outsiders what Yoko Ono was to the Beatles. Ross and Rowan dean were excellent but Mark makes it even better. If you are interested in listening to the audio that trapped Mark Latham, you can find it here at Andrew Bolt.

We were also reminded how the ranks of the non-left are continuously being depleted with the loss of Bill Leak, who was represented by his son; with the absence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose visit to Australia has had to be postponed; and by the disappearance of Mark Latham himself. I am hardly alone in wanting him back.