Up against the wall

Posted on January 10, 2019 by lawofmarkets

There really should be no issue about border protection. You either have a nation state or you don’t. Even without denying welfare to non-citizens, a nation is not a nation unless it controls its borders. That the Democrats, and the left generally, sees advantage in bringing in new welfare-dependent hordes to maintain their share of the vote is the only reason this is ongoing. Increasing the numbers of those who vote for a living is the sole reason the left supports open borders. Madness everywhere – Germany, France, Sweden, the UK – but those at the top on the left will take their graft and be gone behind their walls and gated communities by the time the full costs are being paid, just not paid by them.

If you would like to understand the view from the right, there is no one who may have put it better than John Hinderaker at Powerline: Trump Kills It. Here’s the final para:

Our country is being invaded, as President Trump and most Americans understand. It is far past time to defend ourselves. President Trump wins this one, hands down.

The local press is all left and far left, alas including The Oz. It has columnists on both sides, but the editorial line on things like this might as well be Fairfax. Start with its Froeign Affairs editor: Sense and nonsense in Trump’s Mexican stand-off.

Donald Trump gave a frankly weird speech, his first prime-time television address to the nation as President, about illegal immigration and the need for a wall along the US’s southern border with Mexico.

And then this from its Washington Correspondent: Donald Trump address: Heavy-handed tactic to fix his own crisis. The Turnbull Daily Non-News. From his story begins:

Donald Trump has a right to try to exert greater control over the US border with Mexico but his claims today of a national security and humanitarian crisis are overblown.

For an accurate assessment, this from Slate, as standard left as you can find.

Trump’s immigration speech was too effective for comfort. https://t.co/3dT6rUrd2d

— Slate (@Slate) January 9, 2019

And for more memes, you can go here: MID-WEEK IN PICTURES: IT’S THE CHUCK & NANCY SHOW!. This is the best addition to the ones already posted.

Jordan Peterson on feminism

Posted on January 5, 2019 by lawofmarkets

And back to Cathy Newman. The “ha, gotcha” moment.

How to find balance in an unbalanced world

Posted on December 30, 2018 by lawofmarkets

In part their value is in having things explained from a conservative perspective and partly it is to correct the lies that are never ending in the traditional media, and given how frequent and relentless they are, seem to be deliberate. This is therefore a useful guide to where to look among American websites to balance the phenomenal media distortions: Top 50 Conservative Websites for 2018. In Oz, there are only Catallaxy and Quadrant Online unattached to media organisations.

On the American list, the top spot goes to Drudge, but in the comments at Instapudit many do notice that Drudge has moved to the dark side. A sample:

I dispute that Drudge Report is any longer a “conservative” website…if it ever was. It was always more populist/libertarian/anti-establishment than it was “conservative”. But more than that, the Drudge flavor from even a few years has clearly been subverted. Whether Drudge has changed, or, as rumor has it, he has semi-retired and essentially sold his name to another management team is unclear. What is clear is that Drudge has moved leftward. There is an arguably anti-Trump tone, sly though it may be, to the headlines and the stories linked. This is doubly surprising because Drudge in 2015 was a Trump early adopter, strongly behind his anti-Washington campaign. Something is going on, and I suspect it is the slow, leftward move of the site, incrementally, which readers, like the frog in the slowly warned pot of water, will not notice until too late. Today there seems to be less support of Trump, with more attention paid to anti-Trump articles. There is considerably less vitriol against Democrat positions in general, although the antipathy to Hillary still seems strong. This rating as a “conservative” site strikes me as a kneejerk reaction, made out of habit, without real thought and attention to what is happening there today.

The quality certainly deteriorated in the last few years, and it wasn’t updated very often, but it was still worth a daily visit. However, Drudge seemed to take a severe leftward tilt right around the time of the midterms this year. In a couple of months, he went from a daily read, to a click occasionally, to an un-bookmark for me.

Also left off the list was Ace of Spades which is the site I send people to if they want to read a hardline conservative blog. And while it is not quite a blog in the same sense as the others, there is great value in going to Steyn Online.

But with the media as consistently far left as it is, there are not many places you can go to set the record straight.

They lie and then they lie about lying about their lying

Posted on December 26, 2018 by lawofmarkets

From Powerline: HELPING THE AP GET IT STRAIGHT. It’s not the worst case of lying but it’s pretty awful all the same.

Aug 18, 2016: AP reporter gets Obama spokesman to admit on camera that $1.7 billion they gave Iran was quid pro quo for hostages.

Dec 25, 2018: AP publishes factcheck saying Trump is "recycling familiar fictions" by tweeting money was a quid pro quo for hostages. pic.twitter.com/CWeEdNSAaj

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) December 26, 2018

Give or take 65,000,000

Posted on December 25, 2018 by lawofmarkets

ALL ALONE

Drudge has gone to the Dark Side.

The parties of the left are now the parties of the wealthy

Posted on December 23, 2018 by lawofmarkets

The ideological differences across the world were never better displayed than here: Financial Times Person of the Year: George Soros. And just to make sure it’s not a backhanded award because of his creepy and harmful influence, here are the FT’s own words:

The Financial Times’s choice of Person of the Year is usually a reflection of their achievements. In the case of Mr Soros this year, his selection is also about the values he represents.

He is the standard bearer of liberal democracy and open society. These are the ideas which triumphed in the cold war. Today, they are under siege from all sides, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia to Donald Trump’s America.

And if you have any doubts about which side of the fence the FT is on, then go through this at CNN: George Soros: Billionaire philanthropist the far right loves to hate.

Hatred never enters into it but fear does. The parties of the left are now the parties of the wealthy and super-wealthy. They have the money, the media and the Marxism, a formidable combination, but for the moment at least they do not have the momentum. For a different perspective from the FT, there is this: Soros an enemy of democracy. From which:

His ideological zeal to push for an open society that seeks to undermine national sovereignty and run roughshod over the will of the citizens knows no boundaries.

And he’s hardly the only one of his kind. The pages of the Financial Times are filled with them.

He may have half the country with him but it’s the wrong half

Posted on December 20, 2018 by lawofmarkets

Quite a day for news. First the economy.

FED RAISES RATES; DEFIES TRUMP

MARKETS PLUNGE

The aim is to sabotage the American economy. No one in the deep state, whether they are in the “public service” or George Soros, will be affected. I think higher rates are a positive over the longer term, but everything is now aimed at the next election in 2020. Instability is the aim, so we shall see.

Then there’s this.

WALL STALL…
TRUMP IN RETREAT…
Judge blocks asylum crackdown…
Chinese nationals smuggled across U.S. border in ultralight plane…
GALLUP: Government, immigration top problems…

The Republicans in Congress could have built the wall and at more or less negligible cost. Will not do it. Border protection is the last thing on their minds.

And if you want more transformative news on the day, not even mentioned at Drudge. From The BBC.

Syria conflict: US officials withdraw troops after IS ‘defeat’

Image captionAround 2,000 US troops are believed to be stationed in Syria

The Trump administration says US troops are being withdrawn from Syria, after the president said the Islamic State (IS) group had been “defeated”.

I can only hope this is an accurate reflection of circumstances on the ground. The limited coverage in the American media might even mean this is a positive story that could even reflect well on the President.

In The News there is no truth and in The Truth there is no news

Posted on December 18, 2018 by lawofmarkets

That was the old soviet joke when the two major papers of record were Izvestia [The News] and Pravda [The Truth]. Nowadays our own equivalent is Fake News which is everywhere. We are living in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four which for most people seems quite a comfortable way to travel. We get our three-minute hate and we re-calibrate by the day who our enemies supposedly are and on we go. The Emmanuel Goldstein of our time is Donald Trump, and everywhere I go, these same three-minute hate sessions show up, with my main effort to try to contain them to three minutes. Truth, what truth? We live in a post-modern age where no such thing any longer exists. So why all this? Because this has just shown up today: ‘Junk News’: Russia Report Done By Anti-Conservative Academics:

A new study has claimed Russia’s online interference tried to aid the conservative movement and Donald Trump. There’s a big problem with that assessment. It comes from a left-wing operation that previously classified more than 11 different conservative outlets as “junk news.” And two of those authors were also involved in this report.

The study was released by the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika. It argued that fake accounts, ads, and tweets “all clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump”

The Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project had attacked several conservative outlets as “junk news” in previous studies. Those targeted outlets include Drudge Report, NewsBusters, CNSNews, MRCTV, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Free Beacon, LifeNews, National Review, the Federalist, and the Red State. (Three of those are operated by the Media Research Center, which runs NewsBusters.)

So here it is reported as straight news by the venerable Associated Press and no doubt everywhere else: Russia social media influence efforts ongoing, report says.

Russia’s sweeping political disinformation campaign on U.S. social media was more far-reaching than originally thought, with troll farms working to discourage black voters and “blur the lines between reality and fiction” to help elect Donald Trump in 2016, according to reports released Monday by the Senate intelligence committee.

And the campaign didn’t end with Trump’s ascent to the White House. Troll farms are still working to stoke racial and political passions in America at a time of high political discord.

The two studies are the most comprehensive picture yet of the Russian interference campaigns on American social media. They add to the portrait investigators have been building since 2017 on Russia’s influence — though Trump has equivocated on whether the interference actually happened….

The reports were compiled by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge and by the Computational Propaganda Research Project, a study by researchers at the University of Oxford and Graphika, a social media analysis firm.

And so on and so forth. And to cap it off we have this: Why ‘Truth’ Is James Comey’s Word of the Year. It’s that very same Mr Comey formerly of the FBI who wrote this:

The media has been working, in fits and starts, to report the truth, and the lies. Their reward has been a constant stream of attacks from the President, attacks designed to destroy the media’s credibility and the very idea that truth is knowable, but they have kept at it. In part, the media has stayed on the case because the American people have kept at it. Rather than withdrawing, numb, they have stepped forward. An overwhelming majority support the work of a special prosecutor to find out what is true about the conduct of the President and his associates. More people voted in the 2018 midterm elections than in any similar election in memory. Those voters handed control of the House of Representatives to the opposition party. The design of the Founders — that crashing of interests to get at truth — will work to protect our democracy.

In 2018, we defended our values. And that’s the truth.

Not even Orwell could have imagined it, and that was just fiction. This is the real thing, and if you are not actually astonished by just how brazen and corrupt this is, perhaps you too are now part of the problem.

Evil to the core

Posted on December 16, 2018 by lawofmarkets

These people are savages and beyond disgusting, but they are on a mission to destroy the president that, if successful, would also destroy their very own country.

On CNN’s “New Day” Saturday, hosts Victor Blackwell and Christi Paul put up a graphic showing every Trump-related entity known to be under investigation. It was disconcerting, to say the least.

CNN

The half-dozen entities include the Trump Foundation, the Trump Organization, the Trump presidential campaign, the Trump transition team, the Trump inaugural committee and the Trump administration itself.

Every one a fishing expedition with no actual identified wrong-doing being looked into. Just hoping that something will turn up. People evil to the core since they are undermining everything they supposedly stand for as ethical and just in a free and democratic society.

Meanwhile: Trump’s Accomplishments. These are the ones listed under The Economy.

Decreased black and Hispanic unemployment to a record low.

Decreased jobless claims at the lowest level since 1969.

Black business ownership jumped 400 percent.

Increased consumer confidence to the highest level in 18 years.

Decreased youth unemployment to 52-year low.

Increased median income to highest in history.

Increased business investments 39 percent.

Decreased food stamp use by 500,000 in one month.

Increased homebuilding permits to the highest since 2007.

Increased oil production to 10 million barrels a day for the first time since 1970.

Increased the stock market to an all-time high.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “In one and a half years, President Donald Trump and his policies have been done more to advance life, religious liberty, the economy, deregulation, government reform, and Israel in the history of America. More pro-life and pro-religious liberty policies have been implemented in this short time than all previous presidents combined. It is no wonder certain segments of the media would rather focus on a negative narrative than these accomplishments.”

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