I remember going over and convincing our team, others, to convince that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a b-tch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
He really is too stupid to be president. Why did they make him Vice President?
The NYT published an article asserting 40 “facts” indicting Trump. In truth, each of those “facts” was false or pure opinion based upon intractable bias.
This one is Number 40. Go to the link to read the first 39. It’s a long article, and you may already know most of it in one way or another, but it’s an important reminder all the same.
If you follow all the links to the LA Times to CBS, what you will find is a 2015 article where Trump did indeed refer to the America being created by Obama a “hell hole” and that Trump said he was thinking of running for the Presidency to “make America great again.” A significant majority of the electoral college firmly agreed over a year later.
I also think Trump was again trolling the Democrats. If you’ve paid any attention to the Democrat presidential candidates this time around, you’ll see that they describe America in dystopian terms as an impoverished, violent, racist . . . hellhole. Trump long ago accepted the Democrats’ characterization of our once great nation and promised to reverse that damage.
I think the only reason he has the strength for it is that he finds it all funny, in a very tragi-comic way. I will also find it funny, but only when his presidency is over in 2025.
I have to admit being depressed by today’s news which this article – Why the Democrats Have Gone Insane – has helped alleviate a bit. If the insanity of it all gets to you as well, read the whole thing, but this struck me as exactly how I think. From the final para:
Indeed the whole spectacle might be amusing in a macabre sort of way if there weren’t important things going on in the world. The president is engaged in negotiations of tremendous significance with the Chinese and trying to neuter as much as possible the violent mullahs of Iran, but the Democrats don’t care. In fact, they would prefer he fail and seem to be doing everything in their power to make it so. To call that UnAmerican is an understatement. Actually, it’s despicable and deeply immoral, not just for the citizens of this country, but for the world.
Nothing matters to the left other than whether it will get them power. Yet what do they use that power for? See Hilary Clinton for as good (bad) an example as you might not hope to see. Any good they do for the people who elect them is incidental to their actual motives in running for office.
The left is always dishonest. Everything they do is tactical in pursuit of power. I used to be among them and for much of my career worked to defeat them, mostly in dealing with the union movement, many of whose leaders were as deranged as Jeremy Corbyn, in the same way as pretty well the whole of the phalanx of Democratic Party candidates for president. These people are only viable because for most people it is virtually unbelievable that people can be so openly deceitful, nor can they believe that such great intellectuals who populate the opinion pages of our newspapers, or run national broadcasting operations like the ABC, are actually as ignorant as they really are.
Do you ever see Venezuela in the news? Who, besides people like me, ever bring it up as the cautionary tale it is? For myself, I never take leaders on the left as actually speaking their true beliefs, but only what they believe will actually gull enough people into giving them power. If being kind to refugees, high taxation on the wealthy, free stuff for everyone, is what works, that is what they’ll say. If you do not already know the left’s attitude to World War II from September 1939, until June 1941, which then just changed in an instant when the Soviet Union was attacked, then you really ought to look into it. It is how the left always operates. Remember Kevin Rudd the economic conservative?
No leftist government has any idea how to run an economy, or maintain a free society. Put them into power and they will ruin you. And like Maduro in Venezuela, or Lenin/Stalin in Russia, or Mao in China, once they are in and democratic options are finally suppressed, you will never get them out. Which leads me to this, which is from Powerline reporting on a poll conducted by The Sun in the UK, reporting what the members of the Labour Party in Britain believe. A complete disaster, but even as insane as all of this is, they only put it up because they believe it will bring them political power. And they believe it because some wildly large proportion of the people who live in our democracies actually believe these kinds of policies are optimal. Add in saving us from climate change and you can see where we are at.
If, like me, you have wondered how a left-wing loony like Jeremy Corbyn can remain in control of the Labour Party, this poll, reported in the Sun, suggests the answer: Labour is a party of left-wing loonies.
Marxist zealots have seized control at every level since Jeremy Corbyn became leader — and are poisoning the debate with their hardline views.
For example: only a small minority of Labourites believe that a country has any right to control its own borders.
Labourites are overwhelmingly ashamed to be British:
Members of the party don’t think Labour has an anti-Semitism problem. Most believe that idea is a creation of the press, or of Corbyn’s political enemies. There could be a reason for this: a majority of Labourites say that if Brexit goes ahead, the U.K. should do no trade deals with Israel (Russia fares considerably better), and, in a not unrelated finding, most Labourites are tolerant of terrorism. In fact, only 29% blame terrorism on terrorists:
It goes on and on. An overwhelming majority think a general strike would be a terrific way to bring down a Tory government. Any Tory government. And by 51% to 40%, Labour party members, in this survey, want the government to “take broader control of broadcast media.” Of course they do.
It is a frightening picture. Labour must never again be permitted to govern the U.K. One wonders, though, how different a comparable poll of American Democrats would be.
This is the kind of brew we found ourselves dealing with at our own election in May. I’m not so sure that Malcolm didn’t have pretty well the same attitudes. We in the West are at an ideological death’s door but we haven’t gone through, at least not yet.
“In climate change, the left has found an emergency big enough to justify taking control of everything.”
I went along myself yesterday to the demo in Treasury Gardens, and truth to tell, I found it boring. It was so clearly a Marxist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist network of the kind I had been part of in my long-ago youth, right down to:
What do we want?
Climate change action!
When do we want it?
Now!
Fifty years later, even the lines are the same although the issue is different. Except it’s all so new and exciting for these ignorant and uninformed students who have not an independent or educated thought in their heads – I’d like to see how they’re going in their maths and chemistry courses. Every statement from the podium was a cliche, so much so that within ten minutes the cheers simply evaporated and everyone just got to talking to the people they were with. No one any longer cared what the speakers had to say.
The point I was trying to make yesterday is that it is all very well to be speaking among ourselves on our side of the fence but useless if we cannot force these climate totalitarians to engage in a dialogue. The Conversation – in my view out of weakness and not strength – now seeks to shut down debate on climate change within its confines. There is, of course, nothing that these ignoramuses say that we are unaware of. They, on the other hand, are unaware of every bit of the counter-arguments that have been made on our side. They are certainly unaware of the massive evidence proving that they are almost certainly wrong. This, from Cut and Paste at The Oz yesterday, is typical of the attitude they have:
Climate warrior/worrier Tim Flannery confesses to failure, Guardian Australia website, Tuesday:
Each year the situation becomes more critical. In 2018, global emissions of greenhouse gases rose by 1.7 per cent, while the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by 3.5 parts per million — the largest ever observed increase. No climate report or warning, no political agreement nor technological innovation has altered the ever-upward trajectory of the pollution. This simple fact forces me to look back on my 20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure … My children, and those of many prominent polluters and climate denialists, will probably live to be part of that grim winnowing — a world that the Alan Joneses and Andrew Bolts of the world have laboured so hard to create … As I have become ever more furious at the polluters and denialists, I have come to understand they are threatening my children’s wellbeing as much as anyone who might seek to harm a child.
The dams are full and he mentions not a world. His failure was to be WRONG!!! And you know who is really “threatening my children’s wellbeing as much as anyone who might seek to harm a child”? And not just my children, but every one of those children all around the world who showed up to show off their ignorant concerns before returning to their comfortable, well-provisioned homes of first-world high consumption. Not only do these cruel and thoughtless airheads jeopardise their own futures, both economically and politically, but do so to an even greater extent for their counterparts in the less prosperous parts of the planet. My disgust at these people, especially for their adult leaders who corral these students into these ignorant jaunts in the park, is almost unbounded.
The question I wanted to raise in my post yesterday is to ask how we can make the climate people engage in dialogue so that everyone can hear both sides of the argument being presented at the same time with rebuttals and replies. How do we have a true Q&A? The ABC is filled with leftwing dolts who pander to their own side and ignore the other. You can have The Outsiders and Andrew Bolt who reflect our views, while also discussing both sides, but only viewed among ourselves.
The Conversation has turned into The Monologue. And they don’t care. Like all pseudo-academics of their kind, they already know the truth so do not have to discuss anything with anyone who disagrees. This decision ought to be seen as a great intellectual scandal, that a website designed for academics to discuss issues amongst themselves has shut down one half of the debate. They are the true terrorists, the actual fascists, the genuine Nazis. They are the people you read about in 1984.
I would say we cannot let them get away with it, except I don’t know what to do so that they do not get away with it. Really, what is to be done?
It is kind of a problem dealing with friends when political issues come up. I clearly do not say to them directly that I think they are fw of the highest order so am very polite, adjusting for how impolite my thoughts at many such moments in fact actually are. This from The Diplomad is, however, more in keeping with what I think: The Lost Minds of the West.
And there is so much of it around. Trump, climate change, socialism, abortion, border protection, Brexit, the defence of Western Civilisation, the politics of the Middle East, and the list goes on. As The Diplomad writes, these people are “repulsive beyond words”. I, of course, never have to worry they will come across my thoughts on the net since not one of these ever opens up the blog, even though they know I post things from time to time.
But it really is their complacent stupidity that gets me. Had two of them the other day going on about how the Solomon Islands are sinking, proving climate change. So, I said, if the oceans were rising in the Solomon Islands, they would also be rising at St Kilda Beach. Oh no, they said, the oceans are variable in their height. So I said, I know that the tides in the Bay of Fundy (New Brunswick who are not au fait with Canadian geography) are the highest in the world so there is variation from the moon and the winds.
Speaking at a local party event, audio of which was leaked to the Guardian, Mr Kelly set out to debunk several justifications for climate change action, including the argument that Tuvalu, the Pacific island nation, was slipping beneath the sea.
“The science tells us that Tuvalu, which I often hear about, is actually growing not sinking,” he told colleagues.
The notion that it was “leaked” is bizarre since there is no doubt that if asked by a reporter, Craig would have said the same thing and into a microphone and on camera. And this is what the fact check found out.
In the four decades to 2014, Tuvalu’s total land area grew by 73 hectares, or 2.9 per cent.
Well fancy that. Do they know? Do they care? But the real question is: do I tell them they are ignorant fools. I could alienate my wife’s best friends since these are their core beliefs, and here I deal only with climate which is from The Diplomad discussing the CNN candidates forum on climate change..
For SEVEN HOURS (!) the Dem candidates came forward to prove that they have lost their minds, or, at least, that they assume the voters have. I, of course, did not watch this idiocy for seven hours but would pop in and out. My disgust quota was quickly filled. Let me sum up the doings: the CNN show revealed the left as comprised of totalitarian morons. One after another, these politicos came forward trying to outbid each other in the Stalinist lunacy auction. In the end, we got a Democratic Party leadership doing their best Ayesha (“She who must be obeyed!”) impression, committed to abolishing the internal combustion engine, ending fracking, ending offshore drilling, forcing Americans to give up meat, banning plastic straws, condemning “industrial farming,” and, the best for last, killing babies of color in foreign lands. You read that last one right. Bernie “Honeymoon in the USSR” Sanders wants the USA to fund a huge abortion scheme to kill unborn babies in South America in the name of fighting “climate change.” The brown children must be sacrificed to the Goddess Gaia! I guess he’s going for the Margaret Sanger White Supremacist vote, or he’s just trying to burnish his credentials as a Socialist, you know, a National Socialist . . .. Don’t build a border wall or put babies in cages! No, kill them before they’re born! Bumper sticker, anybody?
You got an answer to this, I’d love to know what it is.
The case of Sri Lankan asylum applicants Nadesalingam Murugappan, his wife Kokilapathmapriya Nadarasa and their two children is the public policy dilemma from hell.
And what’s the issue that is so hard to resolve?
The adults separately came to Australia illegally in 2012 and 2013, claimed asylum, had those claims rejected and have exhausted every avenue of appeal.
In the meantime, they married, had two kids born in Australia, got jobs in a rural town and are loved by their community. Australia would be better off with this family, and they would be better off here.
Their supporters make much of the Christian case for exercising compassion to them: whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.
Yet Scott Morrison forcefully, directly, powerfully made the moral as well as policy case for returning them to Sri Lanka.
Apparently because these are model citizens with nice children, we should throw our laws overboard and let them stay. We just yesterday turned back the sixth boat of illegal migrants from Sri Lanka so there is even more reason for making this policy stick.
But what makes this story even more disgusting are the arguments that are being used against Scott Morrison – who I am growing to like more and more with each decision he has made: Attack on Morrison’s faith splits Labor.
Opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally and agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon stepped up their calls for Mr Morrison to “show Christian leadership” and intervene in the case, arguing that he had put his faith in the public sphere.
This was because of his wishing to come to the CPAC meeting last month in Sydney where Keneally, because of this, became the butt end of every joke made by virtually ever speaker. Get to the final para of the story where you find this:
“Ms Keneally went so far as to describe the CPAC event as a ‘talkfest of hate’, a ludicrous accusation that merely makes use of the kind of language that is used to shut down healthy debate – a fundamental component of a liberal democracy and a free society.”
Raheem, who made it despite Ms Keneally’s best efforts, described the problems that would have followed him all of his life had a visa been refused, since forever after he would have had to tick yes on every application where it asked, have you ever been refused a visa? We thus have this self-appointed moral giant wishing to visit serious harm on someone else for massively insufficient reasons. So again quoting: from here.
Labor’s use of Scott Morrison’s Christianity in a political attack over the deportation of a Sri Lankan Tamil family has triggered divisions within the ALP, as federal parliament prepares to debate the repeal of the medivac bill and religious freedom.
Christian Labor MPs distanced themselves yesterday from two of their frontbench colleagues who demanded the Prime Minister act on his religious beliefs and allow the Tamil family to remain in Australia despite being found not to be genuine refugees.
In this regard I might just mention my own visa experience, which came about because of changes to Australian laws. Since until 1975, which was when I arrived, we Commonwealth members just had to show up and gain admittance. But then from January 1 that year, you had to have a migrant visa which was not all that easy to get – for me, two interviews with the High Commission in Canada, which included a university professor to assess my economic qualifications. After I had arrived, and as told to me by an English mate who came around the same time, there were thousands of English sunning themselves on Bali waiting to cross over on December 31 when, on Christmas Eve, Hurricane Tracy devastated Darwin. Wanna know how many of those English made it into Australia after that. Well, I can tell you the exact number. Not a single one. And that was when Whitlam was Prime Minister, a Labor PM, Ms Keneally.
This post got me thinking about something I have noticed for quite some time: Why the smartest people can make the dumbest mistakes. Before going on let me take you to the heart of it. As you will see, the author of this report, ironically, exactly demonstrate personally the case he is trying to make out.
Consider people’s beliefs about issues such as climate change. Among Democrats, the pattern is exactly as you would hope [?????]: the more educated someone is, the more likely they are to endorse the scientific evidence that carbon emissions generated by humans are leading to global warming. Among Republicans, however, the exact opposite is true: the more educated someone is, the less likely they are to accept the scientific evidence…. When it comes to certain tightly held beliefs, higher intelligence and knowledge is a tool for propaganda rather than truth seeking, amplifying our errors.
The unfortunate conclusion is that, even if you happen to be rational in general, it’s possible that you may still be prone to flawed reasoning on certain questions that matter most to you.
Universities are filled with people who really do believe global warming is an issue needing deep consideration and urgent action. They are also places filled with socialists, who because they hunger for someone else to pay their bills, and hate it when someone gets rich running a business, want the government to run the economy. The media the same. Talking to these people leave you aware how precarious our future is. The more we breed ignorant elites who think they are smarter than everyone else while knowing nothing about politics, history and economics, the more in danger we become.
What really needs teaching is the imperative that whatever you may believe, you should be able to make the strongest possible case for the other side of the argument. The smug insufferable ignorance of the global-warming set, or these full-on clueless imbecilic socialists, is a continuous astonishment to me. They’ll tell you about some phone call from a Nigerian scammer as they head off to some demo on behalf of some group who would if they could rob and murder them in their sleep, and who even say so everywhere else but to their face. And sometimes even to their face.
The American election is still a toss up. Trump is by no means the certainty he ought to be. And you know what? Given the profile of the man who wrote this article –
David Robson is a senior journalist at the BBC –
there would not the the slightest doubt that he is worried about global warming, favours socialism, votes far left and hates PDT.
I was alerted by the title of Graham Richardson’s column today: Diplomacy’s a challenge when Trump goes rogue. Not his own title, of course, but as usual more anti-Trump rubbish that one expects from the socialist cabal. But it was more than that; there was this:
President Xi is a dictator and, in my view, China will need to be run by a dictator for a long time yet. Democracy is just too slow for a nation building its economy at the rate the Chinese are achieving.
Possibly the most revealing statement we have seen from the Labor Party, revealing their true sentiments towards democracy and the market economy. How do we ever trust these people in government?
There was more, of course, but this truly made me wonder how out of it such people are.
The biggest problem in the area of energy policy is the gap between supply and demand, which has not been plugged by the market — we lack a large, new power plant on the east coast…. The failure to lure any investment to bridge the energy sector’s coal deficit will mean the wide-eyed proselytisers of the new world energy renewables push will get to see the implementation of more of the schemes they have been promoting in recent years, and see if they work and at what cost.
And who does GR think is responsible? Does the Labor Party have anything to do with it? Perish the thought:
The Green-GetUp coalition has had enormous success in ensuring that no finance from any source can go to coal…. For the past five decades we were the country with abundant cheap power so the logical question is how did we manage to squander this advantage? When you have abundant reserves of coal of good quality at a good price the tragedy of worrying about energy supply is obvious.
Clearly, Australia also needs to be run by a dictator. At least in China there is no hesitation to burn coal to produce electricity.
Law of Markets 