What is literally never in the news

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The video is from a Roger Simon post titled, Trump States the Obvious about the Press, that they select what to include and what to leave out. Bias is inevitable, but the dangers come when you can see what is left out. The video above ought to be news but nowhere is. This is the text that comes with the video:

Published on May 31, 2016
Muslim savages turn Paris into war zone, again. France. May 31, 2016. Just another day in your neighborhood with your Muslim sub-animal neighbors. As usual, there is a complete media blackout about the events from the despicably dishonest, corrupted, traitorous, Sharia compliant mainstream media, while the equally corrupted, traitorous, Sharia compliant government officials (Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, François Hollande, President of France, and their counterparts David Cameron from U.K., Angela Merkel from Germany, etc.) continue flapping their oral sphincter and diarrhea of the mouth about Islamofauxbia and denying the existence of Islamic “no-go zones” or (called “zones urbaines sensibles” in French, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world…) while in reality, there are now 751 of those, and counting, keeping the true citizens in the dark until the very last minutes their heads are on the chopping blocks while the corrupted traitors themselves prepared for their own sound exits with stuffed coffers of bribed petrodollars from the Islamofascists Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Yemen, etc., just like the 9-11 terrorists’ taqiyya telling airline passengers that they would be ok and alive as long as they conform to the terrorists’ orders (we all know how that ended), or like ISIS’s taqiyya telling the victims in orange jumpsuits that they would be alive, so that they would appear calm on camera until the minutes their heads are sawed off. The same traitors dhimmis morons (David Cameron) engages in endless, meaningless debates condemning truth sayers like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and blocking their entries into U.K while their countries are being overrun by Muslim sub-animals flying ISIS flags, with cities after cities falling into Muzzy hands (London-istan now with Muslim terrorist as mayor). There would likely be bloodbath and civil wars, if the non-Muslim citizens refuse to pay jizya (Islamic tax that imposed on non-Muslims for the right to live under Sharia compliant Muslim society) and want to live. Whether that would happen now when the population of Muslim sub-animals in most Western societies are still in single digit, or later when it becomes much greater, the choice is clear. “Je suis Charlie”, “Je suis Paris”, “Je suis Brussels”, “Je suis London”, “Je suis Madrid”, soon to be “Je suis Berlin”, “Je suis Washington D.C.”, etc. while the bought out, corrupted dhimmis announced climate control as the most serious national security threats. Vote Trump.

The question he is asking is why does only Trump ask the media not just to report the news honestly but to actually report what is going on. The same point is made by Andrew Klavan:

Many of the Republican candidates defeated by Donald Trump — and Ted Cruz, who is fighting a last-ditch battle against him — have complained that the news media created the Trump candidacy with (Cruz’s words) “hundreds of millions of dollars of free advertising.” That seems to me half true. The news media did give the odious Donald a boost, but they did it by spewing such a ceaseless fume of left-wing lies that Trump’s simplistic nonsense, by comparison, sounds like “telling it like it is.”

The charge that the news media is biased toward Democrats is an old one, but only because the truth of it is so ludicrously apparent. When the chief anchor of ABC News is a former Clinton operative, when the best investigative reporter at CBS News had to quit because the network wouldn’t run her stories about Obama’s malfeasance, when the former anchor at NBC News actually bowed to Obama like a courtier to a king, Andrew Breitbart’s accusation that we’re dealing with a “Democrat-Media Complex” seems much too polite.

To some extent, the ideological corruption of our press is an outgrowth of the shattered American political consensus. As our politics has become more European and extreme, so our media has become more European and partisan. It is a shame, however, that news outlets should skew so entirely to one side, that fifty percent of the country should find itself insulted, coerced and lied to on a daily basis.

Why criticise Trump for this is beyond me. As the data on Confidence in Institutions shows, newspapers are near the bottom of the list and TV news is even lower.

Comprehensive, coherent and collective action urgently needed

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I am writing a paper on the disastrous turn in economic theory in which I explain that what is needed is a proper introduction of supply-side economic theory, which is really just classical economics with its modern name. Normally when I do this, I focus on John Stuart Mill since he finally brought it all together in his Principles, published 1848. Of late, I have also taken to using Henry Clay’s Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader which was published in 1916. There is such clarity there that I cannot believe how few of us there are anywhere who are even tuned into this stuff. But this time, partly just for a change, but also because he has more street creds even now, I have based my paper on Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. And what has amazed me is that it is all there, every last bit of it. The language is archaic, and being words without equations and numbers, few modern economists would make heads or tails of it. Too bad for us all, since this is what needs to be understood if we are ever to emerge from the mess our economies are in.

The reason I mention this is because of this news item at The Australian: OECD cuts forecasts, warns on growth. They are utterly bewildered, not just by how dead our economies are but by the refusal of governments to apply more of the same kinds of stimulus that created these problems in the first place.

The world’s economy is ensnared in weak growth and vulnerable to falling into another deep downturn unless governments take urgent action, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said on Wednesday.

Releasing its semiannual economic outlook, the Paris-based organisation amplified its call for governments to stimulate their economies by expanding investment and implementing policies that fuel competition, increase labour mobility and strengthen financial stability.

“The need is urgent,” OECD chief economist Catherine Mann said. “The longer the global economy remains in the low-growth trap, the more difficult it will be to break the negative feedback loops,” she added.

But there are signs of hope. Bad as our growth rates are – forecast 1.8% across the OECD! – no one any longer wants to take the same kinds of suicidal actions that created the problems in the first place.

The OECD called on governments in February to head off risks to the global economy by ramping up investment spending. The starker warning in the May economic outlook indicates little effective action has been taken and highlights the further dwindling of prospects for more sturdy growth.

In the most recent sign of reluctance among major economies to embark on fiscal stimulus, the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations stopped short of announcing coordinated action at a meeting last week. . . .

To lift the world’s gloomy economic prospects, the OECD laid the burden on governments rather than central banks because the room for expansionary monetary policies is reaching a limit.

They’re still Keynesians at the OECD in spite of everything. Such innocence, unfortunately combined with a deadly reluctance to investigate any other approach. I however completely agree with her about this:

“Policy-making is at an important juncture. Without comprehensive, coherent and collective action, disappointing and sluggish growth will persist,” Ms Mann said.

The dangerous part is that she has not a clue what the comprehensive, coherent and collective action needs to be.

Trump dealing with his critics the media

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Almost an hour long but very entertaining as well as enlightening. Also reported here: Trump taunts media to its face. This may have been the most dramatic moment as the largest part of the press conference was devoted to replying to the media about whether or not he had raised money for veterans.

He called out Tom Llamas, a journalist with ABC News.

“I could have asked all these groups to come here and I didn’t want to do that. I’m not looking for credit. But what I don’t want is, when I raise millions of dollars, have people say, like this sleazy guy right over here from ABC,” Trump said, pointing to Llamas. “He’s a sleaze in my book. You’re a sleaze because you know the facts and you know the facts well.”

To establish the facts, he therefore read out the individual cheques that had been distributed to Veterans Organisations which totalled so far $5.6 million. A reminder of just how much the media can be trusted to report those facts. He also seemed to have recognised that he will not win California in an election:

In his opening remarks, he wished LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers good luck in the NBA finals.

He is thus still hoping to win Ohio who are playing Oakland.

There at the start

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IMG_9431

The news story below is how I remember it as well. It was the time when the Democrats’ dearest wish was that Trump become the nominee. So this is how it began.

LAS VEGAS – Political junkies and skeptics are still scratching their heads, wondering “How did this happen? How did Donald Trump take over the Republican Party?”

It may come as a surprise, but Trump’s luck began last July in Las Vegas. In the summer of 2015, Trump’s fledgling campaign was in trouble. After his unrehearsed remarks about Mexicans, his relationship with NBC ended, Macy’s failed to renew his contract, and Univision released unrelenting attacks on the Trump campaign. Poll numbers suffered in response, reflecting a campaign headed for certain demise.

Amid the chaos of campaigning that summer, Trump agreed to appear before several thousand wealthy investors and concerned citizens at a conference called FreedomFest, billed as, “the world’s largest gathering of free minds.” He spoke to a standing room only audience Saturday, July 11. Yes, it was 7-11 in Vegas. And it was Trump’s lucky day. His appearance attracted major media coverage including CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC, MSNBC and the Daily Mail, among others. Trump’s poll numbers rose sharply right after his appearance at FreedomFest and he dominated the Primaries thereafter.

And if you would like to recall the moment, I live blogged his speech and Q&A which you can see here. It is dated July 12 since the blog is Australian and it was already the next day here. What Trump said includes everything that has since made him the Republican nominee, including “Make America Great Again”. A fantastic speech as well.

Why haven’t they been able to do it?

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Achieve recovery, that is. Because the overriding goal is to protect the status quo. At least he has noticed there is no doubt that the recovery programs have not worked. From Mike Campbell’s You won’t hear this anywhere which, oddly, is the case, except here, of course, but that doesn’t count. He doesn’t know why either, but at least he is willing to notice.

The unteachable student

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A passage from an article of a few years back by Janice Fiamengo, the article titled: The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn

Their belief that nothing requires improvement except the grade is one of the biggest obstacles that teachers face in the modern university. And that is perhaps the real tragedy of our education system: not only that so many students enter university lacking the basic skills and knowledge to succeed in their courses — terrible in itself — but also that they often arrive essentially unteachable, lacking the personal qualities necessary to respond to criticism. . . .

Such students have not only been misled but fundamentally malformed. They have never learned to listen to criticism, to recover from disappointment, or to slog through difficulties with no guarantee of success except commitment. The person who is never challenged is also never refined, never learns to cope with the setbacks that come on the way to high endeavor. And it is not only in the academic realm, of course, that they may be hampered: a full life outside of university also requires the ability to confront one’s weaknesses and recover from defeat. Despite the admittedly important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of them.

This article was linked from an even more depressing discussion of the erosion and disappearance of the middle classes, the bourgeoisie whose disappearance heralds the end of our civilisation. The excluded middle dwells on how we are removing the yeoman stock from our cultural inheritance with disastrous results ahead. The conclusion:

When middles are excluded, whether in the halls of academia or the arena of productivity, a miniscule tier at the top may yet find means to benefit or survive while the bottom will form a spreading magma of misery and destitution. The buffer of in-betweeness will have been eliminated. And a once-vigorous culture will subside into a condition of economic and intellectual inertia.

We have lived through a golden age, a silver age and are in the midst of an age of bronze. How it can be turned around from here is the question, but before it can be answered, it first has to be understood that there is even a question being asked.

Safe at home – but not in school

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I only refer to this because of the reference to Keynes. The rest is just Mark Latham discussing the “Safe Schools” program which may be of interest to others.

WHEN John Maynard Keynes declared “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler a few years back”, he knew what he was talking about.

The craziest trend in Australian politics is to teach Neo-Marxist genderless programs in our schools through the Orwellian-named Safe Schools and Building Respectful Relationships (BRR) curriculum.

Even though Australian students are falling down the international league tables in maths, science and English, teachers are devoting class-time to the mechanics of breast-binding and penis-tucking.

As Keynes envisaged, the thinking behind this madness is distilled from an academic scribbler a few years back. BRR’s author, Debbie Ollis from Deakin University, has attributed the intellectual inspiration for the program to a “post-structural understanding of gender construction”, drawing on the work of a Welsh academic Christine Weedon in her book Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory.

To understand what’s happening in today’s Labor Party and its attitude to education, Weedon’s tome is compulsory reading. I got my copy last week from the NSW State Library and was spellbound by its contents.

Parents deserve to know where the Safe Schools and BRR philosophy comes from, and Weedon brazenly sets out the ideology behind these new teaching materials.

Post-structuralism argues for a different way of looking at society, especially in understanding the nature of knowledge and learning.
Since the rise of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, people have applied reason, rationality and observable truths in trying to build a better life. Weedon regards this process as inherently misleading.

She thinks that from our first moments alive, we are brainwashed into accepting the social order around us.

Governments, schools, churches, the media, popular culture and even fashion trends combine to reinforce the “power relations” and dominance of capitalism.

The things we know from observing nature and studying science are dismissed as “biological determinism”.

So too notions of truth, commonsense and life-experience are disparaged as “historical constructs” — delivering “false consciousness” and tricking people into a misunderstanding of their best interests. For Weedon, the process of social conditioning denies its “own partiality”.

“It fails to acknowledge that it is but one possible version of meaning, rather than ‘truth’ itself and that it represents particular (political) interests.”

For instance, growing up with two straight parents is said to “lead to the acquisition by children of a heterosexual gendered identity”. Weedon writes of how: “For young girls, the acquisition of femininity involves a recognition that they are already castrated like their mother”, forcing them to submit to patriarchy, or male dominance. No one is immune from the process of false gender identity.

Individuals are said to be “sexual beings from birth”, reflected in the “initial bisexuality of the child”.

This is the kind of thinking behind the Start Early program developed by Early Childhood Australia (ECA), which teaches childcare and preschool infants about sexuality, cross-dressing and the opposite sex’s toilets.

An ECA spokeswoman has said that, “(young) children are sexual beings, it’s a strong part of their identity’’.

Most parents would be horrified by this stance but it’s become commonplace in the Australian education system.

Having lost the battle for economic and foreign policy in the 1980s, Neo-Marxists embarked on a long march through the institutions of the public sector, especially universities and schools.

Indoctrination programs like Safe Schools, BRR and Start Early are the inevitable result. This breaks the longstanding, bipartisan practice in Australian politics of keeping ideology out of schools.

The purpose of a quality education has been to equip young people with the knowledge and vocational skills of a civilised society. If graduating students wish to pursue social and political change, they can do so through the democratic process in their adult years.

Education has been relatively free from ideological indoctrination. But this is not the view of the new curriculum designers, with Ollis depicting schools as “in a unique position to educate for social change”.

Weedon also said she wants to engineer an androgynous “ungendered” society through classroom tutoring. The other key Leftist battleground is for the control of language.

Inspired by French post-structuralist Michel Foucault, Weedon writes, “If language is the site where meaningful experience is constituted (in capitalist societies) then language also determines how we perceive possibilities of change”.

This is why Safe Schools seeks to eradicate the use of terms like “his and her” and “boys and girls”.

It believes genderless language will produce a genderless generation of young Australians, self-selecting their sexuality as a fluid identity.

Political correctness is not an accident, a random form of censorship. It’s a carefully targeted campaign designed to outlaw the language of observable facts in the discussion of race, gender and sexuality.

For every commonsense ­aspect of life, there’s a PC push to eliminate identity differences. Weedon writes of how the “dominant meanings of language” force boys and girls “to differentiate between pink and blue and to understand their social connotations”.

“Little girls should look pretty and be compliant and helpful, while boys should be adventurous, assertive and tough … (shaping) their future social destinations within a patriarchal society”.

This pink/blue phobia is the basis of the Leftist ‘‘No Gender December’’ campaign, trying to outlaw gender-specific toys each year at Christmas.

The more I research the BRR and Safe Schools programs, the more bewildered I am as to how Labor leaders like Bill Shorten and Daniel Andrews endorsed this rubbish. Gough Whitlam must be turning in his grave.

The Great Man dedicated his life to the principles of the Age of Enlightenment: that rational, evidence-based argument could create a better and fairer society. Not only is the post-structuralist agenda anti-reason, anti-science and anti-family, it is also anti-education.

It wants to abandon the conventional process of learning through known facts and universally established truths, creating a borderless world of genderless individuals.

Australia’s political leaders are sleepwalking into an educational disaster.

As parents we need to make our views known to election candidates and school leaders alike. Anyone who has researched this issue will know we are fighting for the future of our civilisation.

Come to think of it, when I was growing up, “safe” was the word we used for condoms. Seems quite appropriate for the safe school program as now conceived.

Common sense about Trump and conservatism

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This is a very accurate article about a truly vexing question. It is by John O’Sullivan and surprisingly in National Review: Conservatives in Crisis — American 2016 Edition. And if you doubt my own belief that I am a conservative, here is some evidence from just this year – The Indispensable Roger Scruton. Here, however, is O’Sullivan saying what needs to be said, which begins by noting how many different varieties of conservatism there are.

So give me a break! Stop yattering on about th­­­­e death of Republicanism or the terminal crisis of conservatism. They’re not even in the intensive-care unit. This is not their finest hour, perhaps, but they will survive.

But what will they survive as? Both Trump admirers (broadly defined) and Trump detractors (ditto) see Republican and conservative establishments reeling before a hostile takeover by an invasion of populist Vikings and Visigoths who have come from nowhere under the banners of “No Entitlement Reform” and “America First” nationalism. Peggy Noonan celebrates this; Jonah Goldberg will resist it just short of in perpetuity. But the main truth here is that this invasion doesn’t come from outside. It is an invasion mainly of people who have been in the ranks of conservatism all along.

It is understandable if most commentators haven’t fully grasped this, because the invasion is led by Donald Trump, who does come from outside both movement and party and who, as Camille Paglia noted in a very different context, makes a very fetching Viking (“bedecked with the phallic tongue of a violet Celtic floral tie . . . looking like a triumphant dragon on the thrusting prow of a long boat” — wow!). But the more we look at who votes for The Donald, the more they look like people who have voted Republican in the past. As Michael Brendan Dougherty, echoed by Ross Douthat, points out, they may belong disproportionately to the working and lower-middle classes, but they also belong to the Republican-voting sectors of those classes. (They were voting in GOP primaries, after all.) And if common observation counts for anything, it is the lower social end of the Republican electorate where conservative views are most often to be found (though less on finance, say, than on crime.)

It is a long but excellent article, worth every minute of your time. My only caveat is that I do think of Trump as conservative in a similar mould to myself.

It is a smear tactic, you buffoons

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hitler and mussolini

“Some opponents have likened Donald J. Trump to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini; supporters call that a smear tactic. Credit Associated Press”

The one essay I did at university from which I learned the most and have often thought about was titled, “Fascist Criticisms of Liberalism”. And what I learned was that fascism was a form of totalitarian ideology that was essentially tied to an authoritarian leader-principle and whose economic principles were basically socialist. Central planning was at the heart of its economic methodology. It was the nation that counted and not the individual. Hitler alone among the pre-War fascists, married the ideology to racism, but none of this was found in the ideologies of Mussolini, Franco or Salazar. You can tell a fascist state by its use of police power to suppress dissent. Fascism remains as alive today as a living reality – see Cuba and Castro – but the word itself has transmogrified into a term of abuse used by socialists to criticise everyone else. The reality, however, is that fascism is a Soviet-type Marxist socialism without its international dimension. Any ideology can be at its centre as long as it claims to be absolute truth from which no deviations are permitted.

The picture and text is from The New York Times in an article titled, Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism. Here’s the definition they use:

Fascism, generally defined as a governmental system that asserts complete power and emphasizes aggressive nationalism and often racism.

Let’s see which of the following would characterise the US if Donald Trump were elected:

  • an ideology to which every member of the community must subscribe
  • a police state in which opponents of the regime are in peril of their lives and are often imprisoned
  • a centrally planned economy
  • suppression of dissent
  • a state run media

Not one of these is even remotely possible if Donald Trump were elected president. The article is worth a read since it represents just how far the modern media has fallen. The plain reality is that they cannot criticise Trump on the specifics of what he has in mind since even to state Trump’s aims would only add to his support. So it is just ignorant name calling by people who have no idea what they are talking about but manage to have their views printed in what was once one of the prestige newspapers of the world.

Calling Trump a fascist is ignorance attempting to deceive the willingly ignorant. If they don’t know that calling Trump a fascist is slander without content then why would you read such a newspaper ever again, other than to remind you of what great dangers our civilisation must now face in dealing with the actual fascists in our midst.

The vision thing

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Let me ask you this. Is the following headline in today’s Oz pro-Labor or anti?

Labor veteran brands Shorten ‘anti-business’

My take from the debate last night was that Malcolm offered sound corporate advice leading to a strong economy and economic growth, while Shorten offered the promise of a just and fair society in which the government will do what it can to ensure equity as well as a strong economy. Malcolm sounded like a CEO speaking to the board. On only one issue did he come out ahead, and that was on stopping the boats. As for the rest, nothing he said made me think he understood that there are moral issues involved in leadership. The Government must stand for something. Even in his ridiculous concern with global warming, his approach is in the form of a cost-benefit study, rather than as a transcendent view of a better world with kindness to Gaia at its core. You may think that is even more ridiculous, but you won’t touch the Labor-Green vote unless you take that approach.

It therefore doesn’t surprise me to see there has been “a significant slump in support [for the Government] in the key election battlegrounds”. I just have to hope that Shorten really means it when he says Labor will protect our borders, because if Labor wins, the boats will start coming again.