Category Archives: Politics on the left

The left sees itself as the Rebel Alliance

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rebel-alliance

I have to say that watching the latest Star Wars was a painful experience but it did not lack for instruction. The franchise is now old and stale. If you have been going along since the first of these in 1977, the point of diminishing return has long ago set in, and the latest is almost a repeat of the very first, only nowhere near as well done. But in enduring this on this one last occasion I will see one of these films, I have finally understood its point.

It may seem perfectly normal in a galaxy far far away that an acceptable response to the police asking for identification is to shoot them dead, or that it makes perfect moral sense to attack the government’s major defence installation, but nothing is explained. There is no manifesto published by these rebels, there is no obvious list of grievances that need redressing. These are just rebels against authority, and that is apparently quite enough.

To find the film engaging, it seems you have to be the kind of person who finds Castro an heroic figure, the leader of a rebel army that was able to kill its way into power. It makes no difference what the principles were, it was only that they were rebels.

Rebellion may have a romantic association just like righting wrongs and helping the poor. The reality is that the American Revolution turned out to be the only one in history that left its population no worse off than it began. All other rebellions and revolutions have led to the introduction of tyrannical governments that were worse than the ones replaced, almost invariably much much worse.

But there is nevertheless an infantile mindset that glories in such revolutions, and likes to think of itself as oppressed and in need of liberation. This is the left in all its different forms. That there are tyrannies in the world, where government oppression exists, is hardly in doubt. That many of the fools who find themselves siding with the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars are among those being oppressed is very much in doubt. Watching the film made me more aware than usual of the mentality on the left who find catharsis in watching authority figures killed and “the establishment” torn down. It is the kind of mental sickness that has Obama supporting “the rebels” in Syria, or Castro in Cuba. It is a disease which warps individual judgement to such an extent that it must become the aim of everyone to prevent such people from achieving political power ever again.

And now things get interesting

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podesta

You want to see the full story that comes with the chart, you have to go to the intrepid Diana West: Schweizer: From Russian with Money — to Podesta, Inc.. I will give you the start, but if you are curious about how deep the corruption is, and how the media will lie to you without the slightest hesitation, continue from here:

From “From Russia with Money” by Peter Schweizer –“The Flow of Rusnano Money”

Few Washington officials are tighter to the Clintons than John Podesta. As The New Republic puts it, John Podesta is “extremely close,” to Hillary Clinton.81
Indeed, it was John Podesta (among others) who advanced the idea to Obama of appointing Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, according to New York Times correspondent Mark Landler.82

During the Bill Clinton Administration, Podesta served as White House Chief of Staff.

Beginning in 2003, Podesta served as the President of the Center for America Progress (CAP), which has been described as an “administration-in-waiting” for the Democratic Party.83 Podesta later became Counselor to President Barack Obama in the White House.84

More recently, in January, 2015, Podesta became the campaign chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 presidential bid.85 During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, he was in regular contact with her and played an important role in shaping U.S. policy. For one thing, he sat on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, appointed by Hillary. (The board was established in December 2011.)86

…

In June and July 2011, during the time period that he was advising Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, John Podesta joined the board of three related entities: Joule Unlimited, a small Massachusetts-based energy company; its holding company, Joule Global Holdings, N.V., which was based in the Netherlands; and Joule Global Stichting, which appears to be the ultimate controlling entity.93

According to corporate records, Podesta served on the “executive board.” Joule was a new company, founded in 2007, and claimed to pioneer a technology they called “Liquid Fuel from the Sun,” a technology based on harnessing solar energy.94

Podesta consulted for a foundation run by one of the investors in Joule Energy, Hans-Jorg Wyss, a major Clinton Foundation donor.95

Cosy!

The Wyss Charitable Foundation has given between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.96 Podesta was paid $87,000 by the Wyss Foundation in 2013, according to federal tax records.97 Podesta’s compensation by Joule cannot be fully determined. In his 2014 federal government disclosure filing, Podesta lists that he divested stock options from Joule. However, the disclosure does not cover the years 2011-2012.
…

Although John Podesta is listed on the corporate records, he failed to disclose his membership on the board of Joule Stichting in his federal financial disclosure forms when he joined the Obama White House as a senior advisor.100

Oops?

…

After Schweizer’s report appeared, Wikileaks published emails revealing that John Podesta also held 75,000 shares in Joule common stock.

Now things get interesting.

And how interesting did it get? This interesting:

Podesta was not the only board member on Joule with strong Clinton ties. Also on the board was Graham Allison, a Harvard academic who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for President Bill Clinton.102

Two months after Podesta joined the board, Vladimir Putin’s Rusnano announced that it would invest up to one billion rubles into Joule Unlimited, which amounts to $35 million.103

That represents one fifth of the entire amount of investment dollars Joule collected from 2007 to 2013.104 As we’ve seen, it is hard to underestimate how close Rusnano is to the political-military elite in Russia. Indeed, in February 2012, Anatoly Chubais, the Chairman of Rusnano, joined the Joule board of directors.105 Podesta was not the only board member on Joule with strong Clinton ties. Also on the board was Graham Allison, a Harvard academic who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for President Bill Clinton.102

Chummy!

According to some reports, the Rusnano investment in Joule was in part money to build a research center in Russia.106

John Podesta recounted in 2014 the first time he met with Vladimir Putin. It was in 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton was visiting Moscow. Podesta joined Clinton for an evening with the new Prime Minister of Russia. As Podesta put it, “We saw Putin and then we had the evening free. We went to the Café Pushkin in Moscow, and as is habit in Moscow, we started drinking vodka shots….I don’t know how I managed to get out of bed [the next morning]. I wouldn’t even describe myself as hungover; alcohol was still pouring out of my pores.”107

Podesta and Putin — drinking buddies!

The billion ruble investment in Joule energy was a large part of Joule’s funds raised at the time. In 2012 they raised another $70 million, for a total of about $110 million.108

Joule is a controversial company.

Want more? Just go to the link. There’s plenty there.

The moral inferiority of the left

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The left gets its news from Comedy Central. Jon Stewart was the central font of knowledge for an entire generation. You can watch the whole fourteen minutes and never hear a single political point from Stewart. What we have is a not very funny “professional comic” lecturing the others on their “moral inferiority”. It is my first experience watching this guy for more than a minute at a time, and thankfully it will be my last. But listening to Stewart’s empty superiority is another reminder of how out of their depth the left is in dealing with every issue we need to face.

Actually, I have now watched the follow-up interview with Chris Wallace. As hard to imagine as it is, Stewart is even more insufferable – he explicitly and repeatedly denies that the MSM is relentlessly partisan which he has no hesitation in stating outright as if to think otherwise is an impossibility based on no facts. This is the gist of what he says, although not verbatim. He is totally and without any doubt as deluded as it is possible to be.

He doesn’t think there is a liberal bias in the MSM. I am a comedian first. But the thing you will never understand is that I am a comedian and while my comedy is informed by my ideology, I’m not personally an ideologue. What I do is much harder. Comedy is much harder. It is comedy first. Best bit is where Wallace asks him if he wants to do “a re-make of Amos and Andy” after he had pretended to do a dialogue in dialect?

Wallace calmly and comprehensively takes Stewart apart. Shallow, bombastic, and utterly unconvincing. Listening to this after the just-ended election, he sounds even more idiotic than when he was a media star. As Stewart says at the end when being questioned by Wallace, “I don’t even know what you are talking about”. He certainly did not know what Wallace was talking about. He really is out of his depth, and it is only because his fan base is equally out of its depth that they don’t notice. If this were chess, he’d have been checkmated in about eight moves.

Politics and friendship

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There is nothing at all surprising about this: Poll: Dems more likely to unfriend people due to political posts. The only thing that’s possibly surprising is how low the ratio is, but there is an obvious reason for that. But first the stats:

Democratic voters are almost three times as likely to have “blocked, unfriended, or stopped following someone on social media” after Donald Trump’s victory, according to a study released Monday.

The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI ) found 24 percent of Democrats distanced themselves from people on social media because of a political postings. Nine percent of both Republicans and independents reported doing the same to those in social media circles.

Additionally, 28 percent of liberals surveyed said they removed someone from their social media circle because of the content that person posted, compared with 8 percent of conservatives.

And the reason it’s only 3:1 is that Democrats already live in a self-imposed bubble so that by the time Trump won the election, most Democrats would already have blocked people of the right out of their lives. And I have to say that most people on the left are defenceless against anyone on the right who has even a modest understanding of the political news. What can anyone on the left really say that is equivalent to our saying – come on, I mean really, you don’t know that Castro was a mass murderer who held the Cuban people in an island prison for almost sixty years? So you either don’t say it to preserve your friendships, or you do say it and have them write you out of their lives.

Why are these people not being prosecuted?

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Threatening to kill someone is illegal. So how are these people issuing death threats allowed to walk the street. Here is the story, Electoral College Members Receive Death Threats for Promising to Back Trump as President. Here is one of the electors being quoted:

“I’ve had death wishes, people just saying ‘I hope you die. Do society a favor, throw yourself in front of a bus.’ And just recently, I was reading a blog about me, and unfortunately these people not only called for the burning of myself, but my family, which is completely out of line.”

Is that it – “completely out of line”? Do Americans just take it as it is that there are mentally ill people out there who would see their own Constitution subverted just so they can hang on to power which has been legitimately lost. They are criminals if not actually traitors.

Then there’s this: Black Father-Daughter Trump Electors Receive Death Threats, Called Bigots for Supporting Trump. These people are mentally ill. Eight years of Obama with hardly a word said in anger, and certainly many fewer than he deserved. Trump will have his work cut out for him in dealing with Hillary’s deranged supporters, who ruin lives and do no one any good. Free stuff is a social disease.

Meanwhile, you can see how the “truth” is being manufactured right before our eyes: Commentary: Here’s how Obama can hit back at Putin over hacking. It’s from Reuters and is not a news story, just the views of one of their lamebrain journalists:

The verdict is unanimous: President Barack Obama and every U.S. intelligence service agree that Russian President Vladimir Putin has run a sophisticated intelligence operation designed to disrupt American democracy and elect Donald J. Trump. The lone dissenter? Trump himself.

It’s not just that they are fools but that they are criminally stupid. Unanimous, is it? Such lying scum.

The left steals everything so why not an election?

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The story is in last-shot bid, thousands urge electoral college to block Trump at Monday vote. The moral authority of the left is anyway abysmal but the notion of playing by the rules seems to have escaped them. They are all Lenins and Castros in waiting.

Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically — and noisily — in recent weeks, causing some to waver but yielding little evidence that Trump will fall short when electors convene in most state capitals Monday to cast their votes. . . .

The 306 Republican electors who are supposed to cast their votes for Trump have been subject to intense campaigns orchestrated by anti-Trump forces to convince them that they alone can block the reality-television star from the White House.

Others have targeted Democratic electors, who are supposed to cast votes for Clinton, to persuade them to switch to a more conventional Republican who could also draw enough support from GOP electors to swoop into office.

While there is little sign the efforts will prove successful, the push has unleashed intense pressure on individual electors, who have now been thrust into a sometimes uncomfortable spotlight.

They believe themselves so virtuous that they can see no wrong in trying to reverse an election result that if it was rigged at all, it was rigged to see the Democrats win.

MORE OF THE SAME: There is no reason to think the election was hijacked, but even more important is ensuring that the political system is recognised as delivering an outcome that represents the will of the voters. The worse that can be said is that the leaks revealed the truth about the Democrats, which enhances the validity of the election. The left, as always, preys on the ignorance of the population – there are those at the top who want power and there are those at the bottom who believe they will be made better off with socialists in government. There is not an ounce of benevolence in voting of the left, only ignorance. Think about this: Podesta refuses to say election was ‘fair and free’. How dangerous this is for the future of the United States even to suggest any such thing. How despicable for these people to attempt such fraud to steal an election they have most assuredly lost.

There needs to be a strategy to deal with this

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salon

There are two facets at least. The first is that while this is a bit early, it is how the news will be portrayed as long as Trump, or any other Republican, is president. The laughable bit is that there would never be such a post with the intention of criticising Obama.

The second part is that while it has its funny part, this is not actually just for laughs. We treat this as just another example of how ridiculous the left is. The left here is just practising and will do this day after day once Trump really is president. He will never be given credit for anything positive and will be continuously criticised for everything that the media thinks they can use to undermine his authority. There needs to be a strategy that goes beyond showing our own side what a bunch of fools the left is made up of.

Fake news and real totalitarians

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How do such liars get away with it. Because they have no shame in lying right to your face and the established left – in the press, within political parties and throughout social media – are willing to fall instantaneously into line the minute the latest news narrative is stated. A low-information voter is someone whose only source of news are the large conglomerate news organisations. By definition, almost the whole of the population in any of our societies are the products of fake news. If you get your facts only from The New York Times or ABC news, you are as ignorant and possibly more ignorant than if you had not paid any attention at all to what they report.

Think of this which is right now the headline at Drudge:


FAKEBOOK TO LABEL ‘NEWS’
RISE OF TRUTH POLICE!

They label truth as fake news and will do all they can to see it suppressed. They have no shame, but the very fact that we must discuss this and work out ways to push these vile, deceitful scum away from influencing the societies in which we live, means we are losing. How many people might watch the video. Maybe half a million. Meanwhile there are tens of millions on facebook who have no ability, and often no desire, to look outside what they find there. Zuckerberg and others like him are evil people, who like the Lenins and Castros of the world, are trying to guide you to a better future which they can run for your own good, and to protect you from yourself. The big issue for us is to work out how to fight back.

Tax and spend, and then when the taxes run out spend some more anyway

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This is from a review of a book titled, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe, found at the History of Economics Online discussion forum. It’s why you should never elect socialists. They promise you everything and leave you living desperate lives where it becomes barely possible for more than half the population to stay economically afloat.

U.S. businesses are increasingly at a competitive disadvantage with respect to tax burdens when compared to businesses in other OECD countries. The U.S. now has the second highest corporate income tax rate, at 40 percent when calculating federal and state corporate income taxes. U.S. businesses face high business tax and compliance costs. American businesses face a tax penalty when they repatriate profits earned by their foreign subsidiaries. The U.S. has the eighth highest dividend tax rate, and the highest estate and inheritance tax rate among OECD countries. Finally, the U.S. has one of the highest tax rates in the world on corporate capital gains. Much of this tax burden on business is borne by workers in the form of lower wages and employment opportunities.

In contrast, the most successful OECD countries have enacted new fiscal rules to constrain the growth in government spending. John Merrifield and I document how new fiscal rules have enabled these countries to reduce taxes and borrowing. By the end of the twentieth century Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries imposed the lowest top income tax rates compared to other OECD countries; and these countries are successfully addressing unfunded liabilities in their entitlement programs.

Fiscal rules in the U.S. have been relatively ineffective in constraining the growth in federal spending. For half a century rapid growth in federal spending has been accompanied by deficits and debt accumulation. With total debt now in excess of 20 trillion dollars, the U.S. is one of the most indebted countries in the OECD. The total debt burden as a share of GDP exceeds 100 percent, and is projected to grow even higher in coming decades under current law. Growing unfunded liabilities threaten the viability of federal entitlement programs. These flaws in tax and fiscal policy are causing a massive redistribution of income and wealth in the U.S.

On top of everything else, it has made the rich richer and the poor more desperate.