Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
From Theo Calwell in discussing how the left will cope with Romney winning the election:
While there are some smart people on the left, it requires almost no thinking to be a liberal. Simply absorb the political sentiments you hear in almost any Hollywood film, or on most any television program or newscast and, presto, you’re in. Repeat these nostrums at school or work and you will be rewarded. Augmented by the emotional satisfaction of the left’s perpetual righteous indignation, this dynamic becomes self-fulfilling and very cozy.
Titled “The Old Guard” showing the honour guard at the American Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. They remain on duty 24 hours a day every day of the year.
And then there’s this:
I find myself sickened at even putting these together on the same page but they come from near consecutive posts at Powerline so I am in good company. Whatever happens on the 6th of November, Obama is no longer president for at least half the country no matter the result.
A woman’s view of that ad.
Further information: The video is made by TokenLibertarianGirl who in real life goes by the name Julie Borowski. More of her videos can be found here.
It is disappointing that the Americans insist on giving credit for the conception behind the “Your First Time” ads directed at young women voters to the Russian President none other than Vladimir Putin when the credit really should go to Sarah Hanson-Young from our very own Australian Green Party. This is from the 2010 Australian election and it is the same idea right down to putting it under the heading, “Your First Time”, the exact same name used in the American Democrat ad.
We can thus see the idea has travelled from the Green Party in Australia to the Democrats in the US, via the election ad for the former head of the KGB as President of Russia. The ad has thus shown up on three different continents, as wide apart as one could possibly travel, but based on the usual empty rhetoric of the deep left.
The deep left always targets the shallow and uninformed who are clueless about the implications of voting for such people. Since the media is itself part of the deep left it does not so much get targeted as does the targeting. But here we have a series of ads directed at the shallow and uninformed – in this case women young enough to be voting for the first time. The world is crashing around our heads, the economy is ruining their very own futures, foreign relations are in massive disrepair with a genuinely misogynist jihad on the rise. But in the US young women are being asked to vote on the narrowest imaginable series of issues that are in no way whatsoever under any likelihood to be changed irrespective of who is elected president, these being the availability of free birth control and abortion virtually on demand.
But never mind all that. What I am raising here is a matter for national pride. These are ads that have had their origin right here in Australia. We have been able to influence such giants in the world as Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama. And if you would like to see the full details of the genealogy of this descent from SH-Y to BHO perhaps via VP, you can read the full article here at Quadrant Online.
It’s not often an Australian innovation will conquer the world especially in politics but we do seem to have had a first. Many in America are giving the laurel to Vladimir Putin but unless there is a more ancient contender, the true innovator was our own Sarah Hanson-Young. And the innovation is to have been the first to come up with the idea of your first vote as a woman equivalent to your first experience of making love. A pathetic disgusting idea, it is true, but SH-Y may have provided an Australian first. So let’s begin here with an ad put out by the Greens in the 2010 Australian election.
Revolting and repulsive it may be but let us be fair. It was also fresh and new, and so far as we know had never been tried before. It was also written by a pair of blokes who are named at the end, Mike Clay & Tyler Freeman-Smith. You have to wonder about the “gender” of the writers of the scripts for the other presentations now found below, or perhaps you don’t.
But never mind. Let’s move forward to the next in the sequence, an ad that was run this year and posted on Youtube in February 2012. It is an ad for Vladimir Putin and was run as part of the Russian election campaign. I cannot vouch for the Russian but the idea is unmistakeably the same.
I like the touch with the fortune teller. Who else would you go to for election advice?
And the Tarot card with Putin’s picture is a piece of genius. It is good to see such deep thought and consideration having gone into making so momentous a decision.
But now we have a version of this already twice warmed election idea being released by Obama in the United States. The same conception as in the ads by SH-Y and Putin but now designed for an American audience. The star is a young actress who would apparently be recognisable amongst her own demographic cohort. She is 26 so its been three election cycles since the first time she had personally cast a ballot assuming she voted in 2004 and 2008. But I guess the first time for something so important is hard to forget, although the kinds of thoughts she brings to the argument wouldn’t have had much relevance back when John Kerry was running for president. But let’s not worry about logic. This is about something far more transcendent.
So there you are. From Sarah Hanson-Young to Vladimir Putin to Barack Obama. That is, from the Australian Greens to the former head of the KGB to the Democrat president of the United States. An Australian innovation in how to guide young girls into the right way to vote for the first time. I would think these ads are making fun of young girls and tries to make them look like a bunch of simpletons, but what do I know? It’s an idea Made in Australia. Makes you proud to be an Australian.
Mark Steyn has been begging Michael Mann to sue him for defamation and bless my soul he has now gone and done it. Mann is the climate scientist who invented the “hockey stick” model of global warming. Here is the notice of his intention to sue taken from Mann’s facebook page. This is how it starts:
Today, the case of Dr. Michael E. Mann vs. The National Review and The Competitive Enterprise Institute was filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Dr. Mann, a Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, has instituted this lawsuit against the two organizations, along with two of their authors, based upon their false and defamatory statements accusing him of academic fraud and comparing him to a convicted child molester, Jerry Sandusky. Dr. Mann is being represented by John B. Williams of the law firm of Cozen O’Connor in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having ‘created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.’
Nevertheless, the defendants assert that global warming is a ‘hoax,’ and have accused Dr. Mann of improperly manipulating the data to reach his conclusions.
A hoax? Manipulating data? What an idea! The discovery process will be absolutely fantastic. It will be our modern version of the Scopes trial. Kind of like Inherit the Wind Farm. This may be the biggest mistake in going to court since Oscar Wilde.
This is a discussion of the law of defamation as it applies to Mark Steyn. It is by “Ken” at the Popehat website. This seems to be the bottom line:
To have any chance of prevailing, Mann will have to establish that statements accusing him of scientific dishonesty must, even in the context of political opinion blogs, properly be interpreted as specific statements of fact, not statements of opinion. That’s a tough burden. Courts focus on the context in evaluating whether statements should be interpreted as fact or opinion, and increasingly interpret internet rhetoric as opinion rather than fact.
But Ken’s entire discussion is incredible, reinforcing my long held view that one should never get involved with the legal system if it can be at all prevented. Mann is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ which I heartily encourage him to do but when sanity has finally prevailed I suspect he will go nowhere near. A shame – truth will out, of course – but when he withdraws that will be evidence enough of the rights and wrongs, but if he continues there will be more evidence still and it will be bountiful and luxuriant. May hubris be his guiding light.
And it might be mentioned, as many others have before, that not one second of the six hours of the Presidential and VP debates was devoted to global warming. It is an issue now old, gone and dead, with only we fools in Australia left to carry the financial burden for repairing the planet.
This is from Mark Steyn in his National Review Online post, Nobel Mann Takes On Revolting Peasants. I would almost certainly have mentioned his posting anyway, but now it is compulsory. Here is the PS he adds:
P.S. Given that the New York Times is calling this a 21st-century Scopes monkey trial, I rather like Steve Kates’s ingenious headline Down Under: ‘Inherit The Wind Farm.’
I must tell you the title felt a bit obscure for most people even as I wrote it, but I knew that someone like Mark Steyn would see the joke right away. What is amazing to me is not that he saw my joke but that he saw my post.
You can read “Inherit the Wind Farm” for yourself right here.
These are the latest results of a Pew Research Poll that had previously shown a lesser gap but still a very decided gap between Republicans and Democrats. The gap is growing and in fact, according to the latest survey the difference is astonishing:
Republicans generally outperformed Democrats on the current quiz. On 13 of the 19 questions, Republicans score significantly higher than Democrats and there are no questions on which Democrats did better than Republicans. In past knowledge quizzes, partisan differences have been more muted, though Republicans often have scored somewhat higher than Democrats.
And part of the reason the gap is growing is because as people break through the media blockade and find things out for themselves, they abandon the Democrats where only the least informed remain. I suspect the same is here with Libs versus the ALP.
Source for these results: Some interesting investigation in the comments with the source of these results now tracked down by Cold-Hands to a survey conducted in October 2011. The quotation is, however, exactly as it was printed in the Pew Survey so unless there has been some massive change in their knowledge base, the conclusions are exactly as stated above.
Law of Markets 