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.

Shaken, rattled and rolled

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You do have to wonder how much our financial advisors understand about anything when you can read a headline like this at the AFR:

YELLEN RATE HIKES RATTLE MARKETS

Could they have thought a quarter percent was too low? No, they are rattled because there may be three increases in 2017 and not just two. So let me quote from this morning’s press to point out that this should not be seen as a bolt from the blue:

Steve Kates, Associate Professor of Economics at RMIT, said it was good news for the US and could be for Australia if it followed suit by raising rates. “Low rates will kill you,” he wrote.

“[It’s] all part of economic resurrection. It may cost more to get your hands on money going forward, but it is also more likely that the higher cost of borrowing will help channel our savings into more productive projects.

“The belief that low interest rates are good for growth may be the worst delusion of all, causing one economy after another to fall into a low-productivity trap from which it is almost impossible to find a way out.”

What he had also said, and been saying for quite some time, was this:

That rates would go up at the first opportunity after the election was as certain as anything in economic policy can ever be. It was just as certain as knowing that with a Democrat President, that they would not be raised until after the election was over.

I did meet Yellen many years ago and we discussed fiscal policy of all things, so when I say to you that she has no idea how things actually work, it is from direct personal experience. These Keynesians are a hardy lot, never influenced by anything that actually happens in the world. Let me therefore take you to the very first para of this AFR article:

The Fed’s forecast of three interest rate rises in 2017 has rattled markets, raising fears that rising rates and bond yields could take the air out of high asset prices, including shares, that have been inflated by almost a decade of easy money from central banks around the world.

Are these people really that detached from how things work?

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.

Princess Hill “teachers for refugees”

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No real reason to mention it other than that my wife went to Princess Hill. A refugee from communist Poland, Australia has certainly been her home. However, her parents came as legal migrants and both had paid work within the first month of arrival. From Andrew Bolt, who writes:

Have you wondered what kind of teacher could possibly think it appropriate to wear shirts with political slogans at schools, here is a sample.

Strange. Somehow I just didn’t need the slogans to identify the politics of some of them.

But I wonder how they can justify misusing their authority and position to preach politics beats me.

TEACHERS have posted pictures of themselves in class wearing T-shirts supporting refugees, and claim not one was punished despite warnings from the government.

Victoria’s Education Department and federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham advised teachers could face action and even the sack if they wore “Teachers for Refugees — Close the Camps, Bring Them Here” T-shirts this week in protest at offshore detention camps.

Not punished? What signal does that send students about rules and authority?

And would there be no punishment if teachers wore “Teachers for climate scepticism” shirts, advertising a cause that is at least rational?

Where’s the FBI? Where’s the outrage?

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With all the fake news about “fake news”, what about dealing with some real news. Why is this just a sidelight, hardly discussed anywhere in the media.

MORE ELECTOR THREATS: ‘PUT BULLET IN MOUTH’…
LONG-SHOT BID TO BLOCK MONDAY…
Angry Celebs Call For Coup…
Two war rooms, plus ‘weaponization’ against Trump…

We are down to an almost zero chance that the Electoral College will overturn the vote, but we are not down to zero attempts to influence the outcome, in no small part because of how well the election result has been received. This, too, is from Drudge.

AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: Dollar Climbs to Strongest Since 2003…
Homebuilder sentiment spikes 7 points, Trump has them feeling fantastic!
WIRE: Measures of Economic Optimism Shooting Up All Over…

This is partly why it won’t happen, but also a large part of the desperation on the left. Trump might really make America great again. This sideshow is not just repulsive but fantastically dangerous for civic peace. The first of the articles listed by Drudge is actually titled, Electors are being harassed, threatened in bid to stop Trump, which begins:

Electors around the country are being harassed with a barrage of emails, phone calls and letters — and even death threats — in an effort to block Donald Trump from being voted in as president by the Electoral College on Monday.

The bullying is overwhelming Sharon Geise’s tech devices, but not her resolve to support Trump.

The Mesa, Arizona, grandmother woke up Wednesday morning to more than 1,500 emails demanding she not carry out her legal duty to vote for the president-elect.

“They just keep coming and coming,” Geise told The Post, estimating she’s received more than 50,000 emails since the election. “They’re overpowering my iPad.”

Her answer: mass delete.

Despite the avalanche, she said, her decision to back Trump is stronger than ever.

Well, there are crazies everywhere, and you have to expect that in a country of 300 million adults, 50,000 is not necessarily a lot. But there is this to make you wonder:

The effort to deny the electoral vote to Trump was launched shortly after the Nov. 8 election.

The Clinton campaign came out in support of the effort Monday, backing an open letter from 10 Democratic electors to National Intelligence Director James Clapper calling for an intelligence briefing on what role Russian hackers may have played in the election.

To have given any air at all to this effort is for the Democrat candidate for president to be found among the crazies of the farthest left. To genuinely hope to succeed is to tempt a similar effect on the future of the American Republic as the assassination of Julius Caesar had on the Roman Republic in 44 BC.

Revolutionary change

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This is Conrad Black, in the #NeverTrump National Review of all places, discussing the Lights Out for the Old Order. What he describes is what most of us hope will be a reality we can look back on in four years’ time. It was a close run thing but all such changes are like that in the first instance. Once Trump is president and the game plan unfolds, there will be massive shift in sentiment. This is a revolution that will become irresistible since it will be nothing other than governance in keeping with the sentiment and wishes of the governed.

In place of the scrimping Mother Hubbard Pentagon of Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, and Ashton Carter, we will have combat military officers rebuilding a military capability adequate to all reasonable needs, accompanied by a prudent foreign policy that rejects George W. Bush’s hip-shooting nation-building and Barack Obama’s phantasmagorical conjuration of a friendly Iran and Hamas — a vastly increased strategic capacity to achieve much more realistic objectives.

This is a revolution: There has not been such a transition since Roosevelt in 1932. Each major domestic-policy department of government is being entrusted to people dedicated to radical change, to the uprooting of a whole generation of error. Education will go to a great champion of chartered schools (Betsy DeVos), in the hope of wrenching the country’s failed public-education system from the palsied hands of the Democratic party’s decayed allies in the teachers’ unions.

Labor itself will be in the hands of someone (Andrew Puzder) who supports the workers by guaranteeing their rights and liberating them from the corrupt enemies of workplace efficiency and cooperation in organized labor – a barely living group reduced now to the infestation of public-sector unions (only 6.7 percent of the country’s shrinking work force is now unionized).

The Environmental Protection Agency will be in the hands of someone (Scott Pruitt) who does not believe the unsubstantiated ecoterrorism about global warming and will protect the environment without throwing millions of people in carbon-related energy into unemployment in the fatuous professed expectation that they will be reemployed building windmills and solar panels.

Health care will be in the hands of the greatest expert in the Congress (Tom Price) on how to introduce a dual-payer (where affordable to the insured family) universal-health-care system that does not lie to the taxpayer, separate the patients from their doctors, or preserve statewide insurance fiefdoms.

Taxation, campaign-finance reform, and the budget will be in the hands of people (Steven Mnuchin at Treasury) who will raise revenue from elective transactions and reduce taxes for small personal and business income earners.

In the meantime, in the words of our most recent Nobel Prize winner for literature, get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand. The notion on the left that a re-run of the election would see Hillary win is so ludicrous that it is almost impossible to imagine how people can say they have an interest in politics and get things so completely wrong.

Experts without expertise

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Being educated and smart is not the same as being clued in and having common sense. From The Intellectual Yet Idiot. I have bolded the bit that matters most to me. Basically, almost every area of public life is managed by people who have only a learned experience, not an actual experience of the issues they are dealing with. They have studied the subject, but have never actually plied their trade in the area.

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons. . . .

The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.

Essentially, our societies have been managed by a clerisy of the ignorant and stupid. With Trump, it may be about to change, but they will not give up without a fight.

Looking for a Christmas miracle

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There are many things great and small Andrew Bolt does that are important and for which I remain grateful. Among these – one of the smaller blessings – is that he reads Niki Savva’s columns so that the rest of us don’t have to. From today: Niki Savva: admits Turnbull floundering, but still blames Frydenberg, Abbott, delcons…. Expecting Malcolm to do well is like belief in Santa or the tooth fairy. No conception of what needs to be done and no ability to achieve it even if he did know what to do. This is from Niki, looking for a Christmas miracle.

Turnbull unwisely provided a measure against which he can be judged on the day he ousted ­Abbott by pointing out Abbott had been behind in 30 Newspolls. Turnbull has been behind now for several polls. Only one thing will turn it around: performance. And better political management.

Yes, better performance and management is just what’s needed. Unfortunately, it’s just not in his DNA.