The corruption in the US is spectacular, but what gets me is that the people on the left stay on the left. They never seem to have enough.
The media especially. They must see even more of it than I do but they never waiver. If the press would buckle we might see a change but these people are solidly stupid.
Personally, seeing this mentioned by the Poms on an American website does make me laugh. I can only say I consider it my greatest good fortune that I ended up in Australia, not in Canada where I was born, nor in the UK where I spent two-plus lovely years in the 1970s, nor in the US which I lived next to growing up and visited many times.
It may not last the way things are going, but if one surveys the entire planet at the present moment, there is nowhere else better. This is a secret we should, of course, keep to ourselves since it is better to discourage others from overrunning the place.
As for climate change which is supposedly what will make Australia uninhabitable, this was a comment at Instapundit:
In 2015 – Australia absorbed between 37 and 45 million kilotons of CO2, according to peer reviewed science https://acp.copernicus.org/… . In the same year – Australians emitted an estimated 376 000 kilotons of CO2 total. . (2015 was an El-Nino year (typically a year of low vegetative growth in OZ) with the only aspect at all unusual was 17% above average rainfall across the Top End – despite the impact of a positive Indian Ocean Dipole) . If the Australia’s goal was to become ‘carbon neutral’ – this peer reviewed scientific study confirms that Australia has ALWAYS been carbon neutral. . Job done, next…
Not that I think any of it actually matters, but for the crazies who take climate change seriously, we are certainly doing our bit.
PLUS: There is then this which I just picked up at The Spectator Online [for subscribers only].
The left is creating a horror story of what was once a thriving democracy. Trying to imagine fifty years ahead – twenty or even ten – has now become near impossible. If the left cannot have its idiot ways, they seem to prefer national suicide to a democratically determined outcome.
While I freely admit that I have a longstanding predisposition to distrust the standard American sources on the conflict in that part of Europe—and that my reading about and study of post-Communist Russia over the past twenty years inclines me to be more open to the Russian position in this crisis—at the same time I am very conscious that the first thing to suffer and disappear during war time is truth. And that both sides in this gruesome conflict employ propaganda and whatever media sources available to them.
This is from near the end.
In Ukraine, with the blessing of the Western countries, those who are in favor of a negotiation have been eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he was too favorable to Russia and was considered a traitor. The same fate befell Dmitry Demyanenko, former deputy head of the SBU’s main directorate for Kiev and its region, who was assassinated on March 10 because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia—he was shot by the Mirotvorets (“Peacemaker”) militia. This militia is associated with the Mirotvorets website, which lists the “enemies of Ukraine,” with their personal data, addresses and telephone numbers, so that they can be harassed or even eliminated; a practice that is punishable in many countries, but not in the Ukraine.
Nothing is really known other than that there are plenty of those running the various shows who are deeply invested in our remaining as ignorant as they can possible ensure.
There is a real symbiosis between the major American media and the political
establishment, centered in Washington D.C. That virtual unity includes both the Democrats and the Republicans, who, if anything, are more war like than their supposed opponents. Indeed, a friend of mine commented that he thought it significant that on the war the positions of Fox News and CNN were almost identical; he said that because he believed that since all the
major news sources were in agreement, then certainly what they presented was truthful….
The more I read, each morning dozens of sources from all over the world, the
more I seriously doubt the commonly-held mantra of the near-totality of our major news media.
“Today, when there is a war with the occupier at the front, and the struggle against the ‘fifth column’ continues in the rear, we remember and honor the memory of Stepan Bandera,” said Andriy Tarasenko, leader of the nationalist party Right Sector.
During World War II, Bandera led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose men killed thousands of Jews and Poles, including women and children, while fighting alongside Nazi Germany against the Red Army and communists.
It may not matter to others, but it matters to me.
Since we are onto another mass-catastrophe issue in The Ukraine, we don’t want to leave Covid behind without remembering what an incoherent public policy disaster it has been. And here to assist is an excellent column by Adam Creighton in The Oz: Covid fears left behind in the wake of Ukraine. I will merely excerpt from his column in today’s paper with a couple of my own comments at the end.
First, fear fuelled by the media, not science, drove much of the response…. Without the media to sustain fear, the pressure to reinstate measures will fade rapidly….
In a further tribute to the power of the media, 47 per cent of those who identify as very liberal (very left-wing) said Covid-19 was still a great risk to their personal health, compared with 12 per cent for self-identified conservatives.
Unlike the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago, when practically everyone knew someone who had died from the virus, few people would be aware of the Covid pandemic without media reminders. This is happening around the world….
The need for humility should be the second lesson. The health establishment was spectacularly wrong on almost every aspect of the pandemic, even demonising those willing to stand up to it.
Masks, lockdowns of businesses and schools, rampant testing, mandatory social distancing – none of it stopped the virus from spreading in a systematic way, as the evidence clearly suggests.
Asymptomatic spread – a justification for locking down the healthy for months – even turned out to be grossly exaggerated. Vaccines didn’t stop transmission and they started to lose much of their effectiveness within months.
Overall, the response will go down as one of the greatest public health fiascos once a fair reckoning of the costs and benefits of measures emerge….
Not surprisingly, experts are delicately walking back their support, one measure at a time. It’s now fashionable to say closing schools was a mistake, doing particularly great harm to children from poorer families….It’s also OK to say cloth masks didn’t work, as the evidence against them becomes overwhelming even for the numerically challenged….
“The prospect of eliminating the virus in the UK had gone, certainly by the second half of February 2020…. It was already becoming very obvious (by mid-2020), not just in the UK but also across the whole world, just how extraordinarily damaging the lockdown was going to be.”…
The New York Times, a champion of tough measures, published a high-profile article this month suggesting restrictions “haven’t made a big difference”….
Calls for formal inquiries and royal commissions into our handling of Covid-19 are nevertheless premature. Only when the current generation of leaders and health experts has moved on would such a venture reach a fair conclusion.
One of Russia’s top diplomats has warned NATO that Russia is a nuclear power, and will consider use of such weapons if they see a credible threat.
“If they see a credible threat” Russia “will consider” the use of nuclear weapons. This is yellow journalism at its absolute worst. As for a definition of “yellow journalism”:
The use of lurid features and sensationalized news in newspaper publishing to attract readers and increase circulation. The phrase was coined in the 1890s.
Occasionally you get an Adam Creighton. As for the rest, it is a return to the 1890s when the risk was no more than the onset of the Spanish-American War.
This is a comment on a post at Powerline. It highlights how little we know about anything.
There is evidence that the US was involved in the 2014 Maidan coup replacing the Ukrainian leader friendly to Russia with one friendly to the US. This 2014 photo shows Klobuchar, McCain and Graham in Ukraine around the time of the coup. Why Klobuchar is circled I do not know.
On the other side of Klobuchar is Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama appointee who was fired by Trump for undermining his effort to get evidence of Biden’s corrupt activity in Ukraine. She testified against Trump in the first impeachment.
The left and the media lie to us relentlessly and shamelessly. This is from a post I put up on October 21,2020: The only evidence that the left understand right from wrong is they know what they have to cover up about. So the New York Times now acknowledges that it really was Hunter Biden’s laptop. They don’t acknowledge the corruption that they have been instrumental in covering up. This was posted just before the presidential election in the US.
Recastled Managing Director Kosha Gada says the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop has illuminated the power of the world’s tech giants. Her comments come as the world’s digital giants over the past week were censoring stories that are critical of Joe Biden, especially of his son Hunter Biden profiting from Joe Biden’s time as vice president. “The issue really is very significant and extends far beyond the Trump presidency, and far beyond election 2020,” Ms Gada told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “It’s really … for the first time in history, we have this set of four or five companies, that in the span of 20 years are now a collective net worth of $5 trillion in market cap, which makes them the most powerful companies, and the richest companies, and most influential companies ever created in history.
Is it really possible in the world today to seal off this kind of information from people who vote for parties of the left? Of course. Just depend on the ABC for your news. Ignorance is bliss, until the election is over and Biden-Harris become president.
Is it possible for the media to suppress the truth so comprehensively? There can no longer be any doubt about it whatsoever. But what remains the most astonishing part is how those who support parties of the left are pleased to be left in ignorance of anything that prevents their side from governing.
SERIOUS AMERICANS ARE BEGINNING TO QUESTION THE LEGITIMACY OF THE BIDEN PRESIDENCY:
Psaki: We have no idea if Hunter Biden got a ton of money from China and Russia. “We recently learned that the huge group of “intel experts” who signed a 2020 letter essentially declaring the Hunter Biden laptop story to be Russian disinformation have all come down with a sudden case of either amnesia or laryngitis. Not even an admission by the venerable New York Times that the story was legit seems to have helped jog their memories or loosen their tongues. The New York Post, who first validated and broke the Hunter Biden laptop story 17 months earlier, has been taking a well-deserved victory lap and they’re not done yet. A reporter for the Post brought a series of related and quite relevant questions to White House spokesperson Jen Psaki this week. They specifically wanted to know what she had learned about potential conflicts of interest for Joe Biden, given his son’s lucrative business dealings with China and Russia. Strangely, despite these stories showing up all across the media spectrum, Psaki didn’t appear to have any idea what the reporter was talking about.”
Actually they do have an idea whether Biden Father and Son are utterly corrupt. But if you think you have enough information to make a sensible assessment of what is going on in The Ukraine, you are completely kidding yourself.
Masking children is idiotic but you may be sure Andrews has focus-grouped this to the fullest extent possible. Of course, it’s not for medical reasons. In politics it is always for political reasons. It’s embarrassing to read such inane things from a source where I expect them to know better.
The bad news is the propaganda from the global media and intelligence apparatus is astronomical surrounding the Ukraine narrative. The good news is that most Americans can sense the background manipulation, even if they cannot quite put a finger on it.
You can see the general sense of distrust across the broad spectrum of discussions online and in almost all social media platforms. The majority of people sense something just doesn’t add up. While the people who follow political events closely are the ones who can see the more specific details of the manipulation. Those who were paying closest attention, in the 2014 Ukraine story line, are the ones who see the same methods deployed.
Oliver can see we are in a new world order kind of place. A place where government, big tech social discussion platforms, and the mindful authorities in charge of directing our focus, have decided in their unilateral magnanimity, to dust off the moral relativism tools, use the fine-tuning mechanism, and target our attention so that we hate the Russians.
Possible and even plausible but still, what do the Russians think, and why have they invaded? An answer is perhaps provided here in an amazingly even-handed article by Conrad Black: In Ukraine, the stakes could not be higher for the West. The title is more alarmist than the text which at least sets out a sensible pathway into the future.
Finding critics of the pile-on over Russia’s attack on The Ukraine is almost impossible, and that is in itself a cause for worry. Since I still do not know why Russia invaded, what their purpose is or why they took on such a massive task, I will just watch to see what comes up.
I have never seen any attempt by anyone to reply to the urgent condemnation of this decision, made in 1998 by one of the greatest diplomats who ever lived, George Kennan. Mr Kennan, inventor of the successful strategy of ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union, came out of retirement to protest.
He said Nato expansion was folly, and correctly predicted it would create nationalist backlash in Moscow. Did the neo-conservatives who created this policy really think Russia, with its huge intelligence services and vast, sophisticated foreign policy establishment, would not notice that it was being targeted?
Russia guards its interests, as do all nations, just as rain falls downwards and water is wet. Out of this realisation came Vladimir Putin, the direct consequence of the Wolfowitz doctrine. We created him.
In fact, Wolfowitz and Clinton were simply wrong. China was the real danger. Think about this. In 1989, the Soviet Empire gave way to mass demonstrations in Prague and East Germany. It could have massacred protesters in Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin, but it did not. After a few nasty but feeble attempts to fight demands for independence in the Baltic states and Georgia, Russia gave up its enormous empire in Europe and Asia. In return, Russia was treated like a pariah by the EU and Nato when it sought a civilised relationship with them.
That same year, China’s Communists answered their people’s demands for freedom by murdering them on the streets of Peking.
I cannot see how this will ever work to the advantage of the Russians. In the end, this can only work to the advantage of China and Joe Biden, two of the greatest enemies the West has ever had.
When Russia’s Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. rule out Ukraine as a future member of the NATO alliance, the U.S. archly replied: NATO has an open-door policy. Any nation, including Ukraine, may apply for membership and be admitted. We’re not changing that.
In the Bucharest declaration of 2008, NATO had put Ukraine and Georgia, ever farther east in the Caucasus, on a path to membership in NATO and coverage under Article 5 of the treaty, which declares that an attack on any one member is an attack on all.
Unable to get a satisfactory answer to his demand, Putin invaded and settled the issue. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia will become members of NATO. To prevent that, Russia will go to war.
Law of Markets 