Category Archives: Politics on the left

Sweden has “got quite a long way to the same effect”

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Epidemiologist Who Triggered Worldwide Lockdowns Admits: Without Instituting Full Lockdown, Sweden Essentially Getting Same Effect

People enjoy the sunny weather in Tantolunden park in Stockholm on May 30, 2020, amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, whose bleak projections of future deaths from COVID-19 influenced governments around the world to institute massive lockdowns, admitted of Sweden, which did not institute harsh lockdowns, “It is interesting that adopting a policy which is short of a full lockdown – they have closed secondary schools and universities and there is a significant amount of social distancing, but it’s not a full lockdown – they have got quite a long way to the same effect.”

From here. What really happened in Sweden we may never know. But as CL points out, they have a new toy to play with so who cares?

This is how the world will be locked into a deep-state cage within a decade

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Protesters gather Tuesday, June 2, 2020 in Paris. Thousands of people defied a police ban and converged on the main Paris courthouse for a demonstration to show solidarity with U.S. protesters and denounce the death of a black man in French police custody.
Protesters gather Tuesday, June 2, 2020 in Paris. Thousands of people defied a police ban and converged on the main Paris courthouse for a demonstration to show solidarity with U.S. protesters and denounce the death of a black man in French police custody

From Sydney to Paris, World Outrage Grows at Floyd’s Death. One bad cop in one city in America, so what are you going to do about it? Why we are going to elect Joe Biden as President of the United States. That will fix things.

President promises military force if violence continues

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This is the CNN take: Trump threatens military force if violence in states isn’t stopped

The American media are vile beyond belief. As are those of the antifa-left in general: PURE EVIL: Police Chief Breaks Down After Describing How Richmond Leftist Rioters Torched Home with Children inside Then Blocked Fire Department (VIDEO).

The chief of the Richmond, Virginia, police department told reporters Sunday that Black Lives Matter and antifa rioters set fire to a multi-family home with children inside and then blocking access for firefighters to get through to save the children.

Richmond Police Chief William Smith broke down while speaking about the horrible burning deaths of a children after their occupied building was torched by rioters.

Free to lose

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CITIES BRACE FOR INCREASING UNREST
SPIRALING OUT OF CONTROL

As Minneapolis burns, mayor takes heat for response...
Political finger-pointing intensifies...
Secret Service clashes with crowds at White House...
FOXNEWS reporter: 'Scariest situation since Tahrir Square'...
NYC pleads for calm....
LA On Brink?
More than 500 arrests after looting and vandalism sweep downtown...
Police try to balance response...
Security Officers Gunned Down in Oakland...
Van Jones: 'Even most well-intentioned white person has virus in brain'...
Cornel West: USA Is Failed Social Experiment...
PHOTOS...
UPDATES...

Since it is the left, what we are seeing is pure nihilism with no policies. Oh, by the way, this also happened too.

SPACEX ROCKET SHIP LIFTS OFF WITH TWO AMERICANS:

A rocket ship built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on Saturday, ushering in a new era of commercial space travel and putting NASA back in the business of launching astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

NASA’s Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode skyward aboard a sleek, white-and-black, bullet-shaped Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off from the same launch pad used to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon a half-century ago.

Industrial relations reform

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Consensus is “the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved.”

Margaret Thatcher

The quote is from the first of the two following letters to the editor at The Australian published on May 29. Both letters are in relation to the approach being taken by The Government on industrial relations “reform”. I’ll come to those letters in a moment, but first want to mention The ACTU/ALP Accord which I spent a good deal of my working life in trying to contain its excesses. Yet the document was one of the most sensible documents ever undertaken in Australia.

Although he would be surprised to hear this, I have always admired Bill Kelty and especially for having directed the writing of the background document to the Accord that became the fulcrum that IR policy was to be based on. Following the Wage explosion in 1982, a union delegation had gone to Sweden and a number of other European countries where they had discussed how to raise workers’ wages and living standards. In Sweden, the trade unions had explained that their policy had been based around doing what they could to improve business productivity, which they recognised was the only way to raise real wages while also making jobs more secure. It was why so many outstanding international brand names originated in Sweden, brands such as  H&M, Volvo and Electrolux. It was virtually the policy of the unions to foster business growth.

It also mattered that the Labor cabinet was filled with vast amounts of sound practical good sense, from the PM, through Paul Keating to Peter Walsh and even to this day from whom you can still hear its last last echoes, through Graham Richardson on Sky News. I fear that none of these could end up even on the back bench of a Labor Party Parliamentary party today.

I will also say that there was much too much dead weight in The Accord, such as the formalisation of full wage indexation (even with the “Medibank Pause”), and the Productivity Case of 1986 which led to the Superannuation Guarantee. But the recognition of the role of business as the vehicle for increasing living standards was miles ahead of the deadness from the neck up across the ACTU today. Sally McManus is the last person in the world to understand any of this or for the Government to trust. So to the letters from The Oz. First this:

Margaret Thatcher said that consensus was: “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved.”

That’s what Scott Morrison’s plan to bring together unions, big business and governments will do — avoid the things that need to be done. We need significant deregulation, tax cuts and cheaper energy to encourage investment, energise small business, boost productivity and create jobs.

His proposed consensus group will lock in workplace regulations, stifle competition and siphon billions more from the productive parts of the economy to the unions.

And then this that followed next.

History shows the only chance for industrial relations reform is if it is at the initiative of a Labor government because a Labor government can count on the support of a Coalition opposition for worthwhile reforms.

Conversely, a Coalition government cannot count on the support of a Labor opposition that habitually opposes for the sake of opposing.

History also shows that Labor and the gaggle of odds and ends in the Senate will do anything to thwart a Coalition government even if it means damaging the public interest.

If the government thinks it can negotiate with the union movement without a goodly array of people from the employer side of the divide – and I especially mean Steve Knott of the Mines and Metals Association and others like him – then they will certainly be fleeced.

On the union side, the people who rise are those who start out inside an enterprise and at branch level, almost always because they gain the confidence of their co-workers, usually by being the most belligerent, find themselves elected show steward before moving higher. In this way, step by step, by gaining confidence of their peers and coming to be noticed by those above them in the union hierarchy, they gain more power and influence. Those that eventually get to the top are, through natural talent and further training, phenomenally persuasive, ideologically committed and as tough as nails. There is no room for sentimentality in any negotiation with a union. They know what they want – MORE – and what they are willing to give up to get it – NOTHING.

The only reform I am looking for is to make unions negotiate in good faith and an industrial relations system that will make both unions and employers adhere to their agreements. For a union leader also to understand the role of productivity in creating wealth and who wish to work with employers to achieve it are rare, but it is such union leaders that are an absolute necessity if real earnings are to grow along with an economy.

Do people generally know what the initials CCP stands for?

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The initials CCP stand for Communist Party of China.

The CPC is officially organised on the basis of democratic centralism, a principle conceived by Russian Marxist theoretician Vladimir Lenin which entails democratic and open discussion on policy on the condition of unity in upholding the agreed upon policies….

The CPC is committed to communism and continues to participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties each year. According to the party constitution, the CPC adheres to Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, socialism with Chinese characteristics, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought. The official explanation for China’s economic reforms is that the country is in the primary stage of socialism, a developmental stage similar to the capitalist mode of production. The command economy established under Mao Zedong was replaced by the socialist market economy under Deng Xiaoping, the current economic system, on the basis that “Practice is the Sole Criterion for the Truth”.

The government of China is a communist tyranny. It is complete nonsense to believe that the majority of the Chinese population lives in any other way than in poverty and are politically repressed. If you would like to see alternate ways in which Chinese people can order their social, political and economic lives on their own, see Taiwan, Singapore and while you can, Hong Kong.

Everyone would like to see China prosper. But because and so long as they manage their economy under the idiotic guidance of Leninist principles, they will remain a poor country. But if they were content to sit home and ruin their own people it would be a tragedy but beyond that, of little concern to us, along the same lines as North Korea. But they are a concern because they have ambitions that stretch beyond their own borders. Why that is and what they want are major questions today. How to respond and deal with the CCP government of China are the next set of questions. Every time I hear some local politician defend China, I have very dark thoughts about their intellect and then much worse. There is much to fear from modern China and not a thing to learn from either their political or economic structures.

There was then this the other day (May 24): Chinese Troops Cross Into India, Fortify Positions. And then there was the photo of these people being arrested in Hong Kong today.

Good luck to them, but also good luck to us if we don’t recognise danger early enough to do something while we can.

AND LET ME ADD THIS FROM INSTAPUNDIT:

CHINA SHOWS ITS TRUE TOTALITARIAN COLORS ON HONG KONG: It was always a fable, Issues & Insights reminds us this morning, the idea that by growing closer in trade with the West, Red China would grow more like us politically. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shrewdly and in so many ways took advantage of our abundant naivety to grow their power and resources.

Now, as they move troops into the disputed border area with India (which is, let us not forget, a nuclear power), lawlessly expands its military presence in the South China Sea, clamps steadily tighter its totalitarian grasp on Hong Kong, moves invasion forces nearer Taiwan, and threatens the U.S. in manifold ways, America faces a new Cold War. We can either face this reality or continue blindly with our liberal globalist fables.

12Posted at 6:59 am by Mark Tapscott 

The Chinese flu has flown

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Callling it the Chinese flu is, of course, no more racist than worrying about the German measles. And while there may be gratitude from some to our hysterical political class, none of it will come from me. This is from Rage and Recriminations in the Wake of COVID-19 by Roger Kimball.

Back in March, we were told ad nauseam that we needed to close up the country for “15 days to slow the spread.” The major concern, we were told, was to “flatten the curve” in order not to overwhelm the healthcare system. But the healthcare system never came close to being overwhelmed, not even in New York, notwithstanding Andrew Cuomo’s impersonation of the Angel of Death when it came to nursing homes.

How long ago that seems. As it turns out, the 15 days were merely a softening up period. It was only after the nation got hooked on President Trump’s near daily press conferences that the Svengali-like Anthony Fauci, accompanied by his comely, Vanna White-like assistant Dr. Deborah Birx, dispensed ever-more alarming scenarios of the countless deaths that awaited us—the models said so!—unless we closed our eyes and hid under our desks until Saturday next.

To date, there are nearly 100,000 deaths attributed to the Wuhan flu. Half of those are in nursing homes. Half are over 80. According to the CDC, in 2017-2018, 45 million people in the United States were sick with influenza, 21 million went to the doctor, 810,000 were hospitalized, and there were 61,000 deaths. Last year, flu deaths topped 80,000. Unlike this Chinese virus, which affects mostly the elderly and infirm, the flu is deadly for young and old alike.

And this just in from the CDC: the mortality rate of the Wuhan flu is remarkably low: right in line, in fact (and as I suggested at the time), with the projection made by the Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis in February. While he acknowledged that there was much we did not know about the virus, he nonetheless said that “reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05 percent to 1 percent.” But with every passing day—and this was back in February—the evidence suggests that we will wind up on the lower end of that spectrum….

Indeed, the most recent CDC guidance, though hedged with technicalities and alternative scenarios, basically confirms Ioannidis’s prediction. As Daniel Horowitz noted, the report should be “earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class.” But the guardians of The Narrative are strong. More likely, it will wind up in “the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public.”

What does it say? Among other things—and for the first time—it offers an overall death rate for the virus. And what is it? The horrifying 3.5 percent that the now-thoroughly discredited Imperial College model predicted? (Now “thoroughly discredited” but deeply influential on the projections of important people like Anthony Fauci.) Not hardly. Under the report’s most likely scenario, the number is 0.26 percent—almost exactly what Ioannidis said in February.

We have a population of 25 million and around a 100 deaths. I wish we had been more like Sweden, or Taiwan, or a few others where heads were kept level. The question now is what would we do if there really were a pandemic?

 

Obama led a gangster government but no one really cares

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Which led to this.

We are in fact just so used to the criminality of the left and of the Obama administration that none of this outrages any of us any longer, perhaps a bit but not really. We are used to the left acting illegally followed by the protection and lying obfuscation of the media that it is partly just how we think things are and cannot be changed, and partly because a kind of numb despair has soaked into all of our responses.

I find this in particular fascinating in how clearly things are put: Nevertheless, Sidney Powell Persisted. That so few know who Sidney Powell is and what she did is the problem in a nutshell.

She was demeaned and ridiculed as a “#MAGA lawyer” by the smart set at Politico.

She was second-guessed as a “screw-up” by legal blogs.

She was written off for “crackpot conspiracy theories” by former intelligence officials doing their best to protect their friends in the permanent bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, Sidney Powell persisted.

In an honest universe, Ms. Powell, the courageous attorney who engineered a miraculous defense of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn that led to the Justice Department withdrawing criminal charges against President Trump’s former National Security Adviser, would be hailed as a political and cultural hero. This solitary woman just faced down the epitome of the “old boys network” and emerged victorious.

Is there any better symbol of the patriarchy than Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team, which was populated by a bunch of “old white guys” on a five to one ratio to the three women selected for the task of investigating President Trump?

As Gen. Flynn was facing sentencing for his guilty plea that was forced upon him by the strong-arm tactics of Mueller and the disgraced FBI officials on the 7th floor of the J. Edgar Hoover building, Judge Emmit Sullivan accused the 33-year veteran of the United States Army of “selling out your country.” Sullivan indicated that he was not inclined to let Flynn off without serving time, as his lawyers had promised.

Flynn began to rethink the effectiveness of his multi-million-dollar defense, whose firm included former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder. Enter Sidney Powell, who took the reins of the case in June 2019.

As Flynn’s new counsel, Powell inherited a client who had pled guilty to Mueller’s prosecutors, articulated that guilty plea in open court, and was merely awaiting the inevitable sentencing that could lead to a humiliating jail sentence.

Powell examined the case and advised on a radical Hail Mary defense: Withdraw your plea and fight these corrupt bastards. Flynn, drawing on his military career and training, trusted in Powell’s leadership and charged up that hill.

There’s much more at the link. Do you think any of this matters? Are you interested enough to continue even if only to find out the kind of world in which you live?

And there is now this as well: Curiously Odd Decision by Judge Sullivan to Hire Beth Wilkinson. Who are these people, and what’s it got to do with the rest of this, you might ask?

Gen. Flynn’s counsel files a Petition for Writ of Mandamus with the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, asking the Court to “Mandate” that Judge Sullivan dismiss the case based on controlling Circuit precedent, an exercise that almost never produces a Writ such as that sought by the Defendant.

Giving a “one-finger salute” to the filing of the Petition, Judge Sullivan enters an Order setting a briefing schedule for the filing of opposition and reply briefs on the issues before the Court as set forth in the DOJ motion to dismiss, setting a hearing date nearly two months away.

The next morning the Circuit Court of Appeals ORDERS the district judge to personally respond to the Petition for Writ of Mandamus and address the issue of whether he has any discretion on the question of granting the motion to dismiss the case — giving him only 10 days to do so, which includes a federal three-day holiday weekend.

Judge Flynn doubles down by hiring private legal counsel to assist him in responding to the Circuit Court’s order.

Wow. Why they don’t clap this “judge” in jail I cannot answer, but the judge has no fear of defying the law as he so clearly has now done.