British Politics reshaped by issues of national identity

As in the Trump revolt, issues of national identity and loyalty are shaping British politics too. In Britain, the old guard want to remain connected to the EU, while those who want to make Britain great again want out of the EU as soon as possible

Labour faces being crushed between Ukip [out] and a resurgent Liberal Democrat Party [in] in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, senior allies of Jeremy Corbyn [British Leftist leader] admitted last night.

The party suffered humiliation in the Richmond Park by-election yesterday, losing its deposit in a London by-election for the first time since 1909.

The victorious Lib Dems, who overturned Zac Goldsmith’s 23,015 majority after running a strongly pro-European campaign, vowed to supplant Labour as the main opposition to a hard Brexit.

Labour figures fear that the party faces electoral crisis as it loses votes to the Lib Dems in pro-Remain urban and southern seats, while Ukip builds support in its working-class heartlands of the north and Midlands.

Chuka Umunna, the former leadership hopeful, warned that there were now “no safe Labour seats”.

Even those close to Mr Corbyn said that Brexit “has unleashed a dynamic that none of us quite understood” — with voters increasingly ditching old party loyalties and instead defining themselves as pro-EU or anti-EU.

A senior Corbyn ally said: “We do have two different strong pulls. There are metropolitan seats, in London, Manchester and Leeds; they are strongly pro-EU. Then equally, there are dozens and dozens of seats which are working class, where many did not vote to remain. There’s no doubt it’s difficult to balance the two.”

Labour’s dismal showing in Richmond, where it polled just 1,515 votes — fewer than the local party has members — led Clive Lewis, the shadow business secretary, to call for it to consider electoral pacts with other parties.

“It’s quite clear that the usual political playbook parties use isn’t necessarily going to work in the situation we find ourselves in now,” he told the Politico website.

Other senior party figures dismissed that, insisting instead that Mr Corbyn had to move urgently to formulate a more coherent response to the referendum. Labour has vowed not to thwart Brexit but wants Theresa May to set out her plans to allow “proper scrutiny”.

Mr Goldsmith’s humiliation has also killed speculation that Mrs May could hold a general election next year. Senior Conservatives said it proved that voters punished unnecessary polls and the result underlined the fluidity and volatility of the present political climate.

An analysis by the British Election Study in October revealed that people identified more strongly with how they voted in the EU referendum than a political party. The researcher warned that “this new cleavage could yet disrupt British politics”. “The EU referendum revealed a more fundamental divide,” Chris Prosser, of Manchester University, said.

Labour is braced for another by-election humiliation next week in the Tory-held seat of Sleaford and North Hykeham in Lincolnshire. With Ukip the main challenger, Mr Corbyn’s party faces being driven into fourth place.

Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, called on Sleaford voters, 40 per cent of whom voted Remain, to underline the message to Mrs May that they opposed an “extreme Brexit” as he sought to capitalise on his party’s by-election win.

SOURCE

****************************

British national assertiveness is being expressed in a very traditional way

With mockery of France.  The following rather savage cartoon about the President of France appeared in "The Times", of all places. The frog hopping off probably refers to the fact that M. Hollande has decided not to run for a second term as President.  The nude on the scooter refers to this



*****************************

National sentiment strong in Austria too


Hofer

If Europe’s first far-right president since the Second World War is chosen by voters in Austria tomorrow he will prove that he is “a far cry from a Nazi”, one of his closest political friends said yesterday.

Norbert Hofer, 45, the Freedom Party (FPO) candidate, has been narrowly ahead in most opinion polls against his Green Party rival Alexander Van der Bellen, 72, after an annulled vote in May and a postponed rerun in October.

A victory for Mr Hofer would be seen as continuing the Continent’s lurch to the nationalist right and a further blow to the European Union, with the FPO threatening its own membership referendum in certain circumstances.

Nearly 125 miles west of the capital, Vienna, in the “blue city” of Wels — so called because it is the largest metropolitan area under FPO control — anger over immigration fuelled support for the party founded in the 1950s by former Nazis.

The office of president does not carry much direct power but opponents are worried that Mr Hofer would use it to precipitate a general election and propel his party to government, perhaps in coalition with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP), just as they are in Wels.

FREEDOM PARTY KEY POLICIES

Limited immigration and asylum

Social housing “primarily” for Austrians

Oppose gay marriage

All foreign criminals deported

Compulsory national service

EU referendum in certain circumstances, for example if EU takes more powers

Andreas Rabl, 44, the mayor of Wels, who came to power last year on a surge of support during the migration crisis, said that the country needed to refocus on “Austrian values”, like his city.

He has begun intensive German language training for schoolchildren, half of whom he said could not understand the teacher when they started school, and has required all state-funded nurseries and schools to celebrate Christian festivals and eat traditional food. He has blocked a planned new refugee centre, arguing that the town has enough foreigners, with 24 per cent of citizens from outside Austria.

“There is this constant message that the FPO is a Nazi party, the new fascism and dictatorial,” Mr Wels, a long-standing friend of Mr Hofer, said. “The foreign media report about right-wing radicalism and the far right in Austria, I hear that all the time. I ask myself, what are they talking about? We have not killed anyone, we were in the government [from 2000 to 2005] and relinquished power voluntarily, there was no civil war and no other violent military clashes.”

He added: “New fascism — I do not see it. Mr Hofer as president would have the opportunity to correct this view. We are a normal right-wing party, correct, but we are a far cry from a Nazi party.”

In the first round of the election, the mainstream parties were eliminated by an electorate fed up with the government coalition of centre left and centre right. In the run-off in May Mr Van der Bellen beat Mr Hofer by just 30,863 out of 4.47 million votes. The FPO then won a case in court to have the result overturned due to procedural irregularities.

Supporters of Mr Van der Bellen in Wels claim that, like their mayor, Mr Hofer is the smiling face of a divisive and xenophobic party and tones down his message when he is not among core supporters.

Meanwhile Mr Van der Bellen, a chain-smoking former leader of the Greens, is distrusted by conservative voters. Walter Teubl, a Green member of the Wels city authority, said: “The OVP always portrayed the Greens as an ultra-left party. There were many lies about us — that we would legalise cannabis or ban car driving.”

SOURCE

***********************

The clash of the campaign managers


Kellyanne Conway (left), Trump-Pence campaign manager, sat next to Robby Mook, Clinton-Kaine campaign manager, prior to a forum at Harvard University on Thursday.  So the "Sexist" Trump team was led by a woman while the Clinton team was led by a man.  So much for Leftist accusations about Trump's biases. It would be more plausible to say that Clinton was the biased one.  How come she could not find a female campaign manager?  And the Donks are still relying on conspiracy theories to explain their loss.  Dumb.

The presidential campaign manager conference, held at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government every four years since 1972, is usually a place for insider war stories, shared and documented for history.

However, three weeks after this year’s divisive election, in a conference room with a half-dozen aides from both sides facing each other, the conversation quickly took a remarkably combative turn, highlighting just how deep the enmity between the Trump and Clinton camps remains.

“Do you think you could have just had a decent message for white working-class voters?” Conway asked the Clinton team, then sarcastically offering a message: “How about, it’s Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t connect with people? How about, they have nothing in common with her? How about, she doesn’t have an economic message?”

Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, responded: “There were dog whistles sent out to people. . . . Look at your rallies. He delivered it.”

Conway accused the Democrats of refusing to accept their loss.

“Guys, I can tell you are angry, but wow,” she said. “Hashtag he’s your president. How’s that? Will you ever accept the election results? Will you tell your protesters that he’s their president, too?”

At a forum that was less heated than the earlier encounter, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and Conway offered starkly different explanations for the election’s outcome.

Mook said that outside interference — including meddling by Russian entities — tilted the results Trump’s way, while Conway portrayed broader strategic decisions as behind the GOP win.

Conway, who took increasing control of the Trump campaign over the summer, said that she prevailed upon Trump to play “the happy warrior” and encouraged him to draw energy from his public rallies. That, she said, contrasted with the public image of Clinton.

“I said to Mr. Trump, ‘You know, you’re running against one of the most joyless presidential candidates in history,’ ” Conway said.

SOURCE

**************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************

Justin Trudeau: Baby-Faced Commie Apologist Unmasked

Wasn’t one vapid pretty boy named Justin from Canada enough?

At least Justin Bieber is eye candy without the heartburn. Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, is the twinkly-eyed boy toy who makes informed adults wanna hurl.

For more than a year, the liberal Canadian prime minister enjoyed drool-stained global press coverage as the “hot hipster” and “dreamy sex symbol” with great hair and a tribal Haida tattoo. He basked in Ryan Gosling-esque memes about his commitment to feminism and touched off “Trudeau-mania” with a series of shirtless selfies and photobombs.

But this weekend, the sane world saw the baby-faced Commie apologist for the naked twit he truly is.

Mourning the death of repressive dictator Fidel Castro, Trudeau hailed his longtime family friend as a “larger than life leader” who “served his people for almost half a century.” Actually, El Comandante ruled with an iron fist and firing squads — serving himself to all of the island’s land, private businesses and media, along with his own private yacht, private island, 20 homes, fleet of Mercedes limos and bevy of mistresses.

Trudeau’s ridiculous mash note to the “legendary revolutionary and orator” caused the social media backlash of the year. The hashtag #TrudeauEulogies erupted to mock Trudeau’s soft-soaping of tyranny.

“As we mourn Emperor Caligula, let us always remember his steadfast devotion to Senate reform,” one Twitter user jibed in Trudeau-speak. “Although flawed Hitler was a vegetarian who loved animals, was a contributor to the arts & proud advocate for Germany,” another joked. “Kim Jong Il will always be remembered fondly for his leadership and contributions on climate change,” another chimed in.

Stung, the Canadian tundra hunk’s office announced Monday that he will not attend services for his beloved Uncle Fidel, who had served as a pallbearer at his former Canadian PM father’s funeral. But if Trudeau thinks the damage to his celebrity brand is temporary, he has another think coming.

Our neighbors to the north are now discovering what disillusioned Barack Obama worshipers realized too late: Beneath the shiny packaging of supermodel progressivism lies the same old decrepit culture of corruption.

Political watchdogs have been buzzing about Trudeau’s shady fundraising ties to Chinese communist moguls. Like Obama, Trudeau promised unprecedented transparency in government — “sunny ways” that would shed open light on how the Liberal Party was conducting the people’s business. Dudley Do-Right’s party declared there would be “no preferential access, or appearance of preferential access” in exchange for campaign cash and purported to ban favor-seekers with direct business before the government from attending political fundraisers.

Behind closed doors, however, Trudeau was selling out to wealthy Chinese-Canadians and Chinese nationals seeking government green lights for their business deals. According to his conservative critics, Trudeau and the Liberal Party have held 80 such cash-for-access fundraisers crawling with lobbyists and access traders over the past year.

The Globe and Mail newspaper revealed last week that Trudeau and his Liberal Party fundraisers had secretly organized one tony $1,500-per-head private residential gala in May attended by Chinese billionaires and bankers gunning for federal approval of projects. Echoing the operations of the Clinton Foundation pay-for-play money machine, the nonprofit Trudeau Foundation and the University of Montreal raked in $1 million from a wealthy Chinese businessman a few weeks after the fundraiser. The donation includes funding for a statue of Pierre Trudeau, who once wrote a book hailing Chairman Mao.

The self-aggrandizing Commie fanboy apple doesn’t fall far from his cultural Marxist tree.

SOURCE

***************************

Let's Fight Tyranny

For more than a half-century, it has become abundantly clear that our nation faces increasing irreconcilable differences. At the root is the fact that there is one group of Americans who mostly want to be left alone and live according to the rule of law and the dictates of the U.S. Constitution while another group of Americans wants to control the lives of others and ignore both the rule of law and constitutional restraints on the federal government. Should those Americans who favor the rule of law and constitutional government fight against or yield to those Americans who have contempt for the rule of law and constitutional government? Let’s look at a few of those irreconcilable differences.

Some Americans prefer to manage their own health care needs. Others wish to have the federal government dictate their health care. Some Americans want their earnings to be taxed only for the constitutionally mandated functions of the federal government, which are outlined in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Others think American earnings should be taxed for anything on which Congress can muster a majority vote. Though there is no constitutional authority for federal involvement in public education, some Americans want the federal government involved. The list of irreconcilable differences among the American people is nearly without end. These differences survive because of the timidity of those offended and the brute power of the federal government.

I think reconciliation is impossible; therefore, separation is the only long-term peaceful solution. Separation and independence do not require that liberty-loving Americans overthrow the federal government any more than they required Gen. George Washington to overthrow the British government in order to secede or required his successor secessionist, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, to overthrow the U.S. federal government.

You say, “All those government acts that you say violate the rule of law and the Constitution have been ruled constitutional by the courts!” That’s true. The courts have twisted the Constitution, but Thomas Jefferson warned, “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions (is) a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”

State governors and legislators ought to summon up the courage our Founding Fathers had in their response to the fifth Congress' Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Written by Jefferson and James Madison, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 stated that those states' legislatures considered the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional. They said, “Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government … and … whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” The 10th Amendment to our Constitution holds, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The federal government should not be permitted to determine the scope of its own powers. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 28, said, “The State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.” One response to federal encroachment is for state governments to declare federal laws that have no constitutional authority null and void and refuse to obey them. In other words, they should nullify federal laws that violate the Constitution. In good conscience, liberals could not object to nullification. There are hundreds of so-called sanctuary cities in the U.S. — liberal places that have chosen to nullify federal immigration laws and harbor immigrants who are here illegally.

Former slave Frederick Douglass advised: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. … The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” We Americans appear to have very limited endurance in the face of tyrannical oppression.

SOURCE

**************************

GOP Has Golden Opportunity to Expand Liberty

For those who work to restore constitutionally limited government — as we in our humble shop do daily — a recent Quinnipiac poll is daunting. It shows large majorities or pluralities of Americans oppose reducing regulations, oppose across-the-board tax cuts, and favor increased federal spending on infrastructure and other goodies.

Leaving aside the accuracy of the poll (Quinnipiac had Hillary Clinton +7 nationally less than two weeks before the election), the polling reveals a paradox in the mindset of the American electorate. Every American — Republican and Democrat, men and women, young and old, black, white, Hispanic or Asian, rich or poor — wants government to mind its own business ... except for their preferred program or regulation.

John Stossel writes, "Few people bother to go to Washington to ask for spending cuts. Even though America is heading toward bankruptcy, 90 percent of congressional testimony comes from people who want more stuff."

What far too few Americans understand is that to empower government is to restrict individual liberty, and once you agree to grant government power over A, you have opened the door to granting government power to do B, C and D.

That is why the Founding Fathers strictly limited the power of the federal government, forbidding it from any and all actions not specifically authorized under the U.S. Constitution and, for emphasis, declaring in Amendments IX and X the primacy of the individual and the states over every sphere not listed in those enumerated powers.

The Founders understood the truth and wisdom in George Washington's declaration: "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master!"

Few Americans, for example, would disagree with the idea that everyone should have access to health care, but the devil is in the details. Without the vote of a single Republican, arrogant Democrats, invigorated by their electoral victories, passed ObamaCare, ostensibly to guarantee health care to every American. As a result, the IRS was granted access to our medical information, we were forced to buy an outrageously expensive product whether we wanted it or not, we faced a bevy of new taxes and burdensome regulations, and tens of millions of Christians were forced to fund abortion through their insurance.

Government is necessary to protect the rights of individuals, but it is the nature of government to expand and acquire power, and that power is acquired at the expense of individual liberties. As another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, so eloquently put it, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

Ironically, the very government that we empower to do our bidding against our neighbor ends up being the government that becomes our master.

Disagree? Keep in mind that when the 16th Amendment (the income tax) was proposed, its proponents promised that it would only affect the very rich. The bottom bracket was a 1% tax on income over $20,000 ($488,341 in 2016 inflation-adjusted dollars) and a top bracket of 7% for income over $500,000 ($12,208,535 in 2016 inflation-adjusted dollars). It was a way, its proponents argued, to make the rich pay their "fair share" (sound familiar?). Yet in a very short time the rates went up and the entry point for the bottom bracket went down, eventually capturing many more Americans in its web, and creating the IRS, possibly the most feared institution in American government, with the power to ruin your life and take everything you own.

Government is a necessary evil. As a third Founder, James Madison, argued in Federalist No. 51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

Thus, individual liberties are safest when government is smallest, and when the power of government is closest to the people. As constructed by the Founders, the vast majority of government is enacted at the local and state level, with only a small portion belonging to the federal government.

When they held the White House, Senate, and House under George W. Bush, the Republicans blew a golden opportunity. Instead of reducing the size and scope of government, they doubled government spending and gave us Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and an expansion of nearly every federal department and agency.

In 2016, Republicans get a do-over. While Democrats claim the GOP has no mandate because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, Republicans can counter with the fact that the GOP won a 3.2 million national popular vote majority in House races, and under Barack Obama, Republicans have won a net 11 Senate seats, 63 House seats, 14 governorships, and roughly 1,000 state legislative seats.

Republicans have a rare opportunity to reduce the size and scope of government at every level, and return to the form envisioned by the Founders, where government is limited and individual liberty is vast. It's in the best interests of every American to encourage them to do just that. Our job is to educate our fellow Americans accordingly.

SOURCE

CHRIS BRAND is now out of intensive care so we have good hopes for him

**************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************

Thank You, Jill Stein

Over the long holiday weekend, the radical left and their poodles in the Democrat Party announced a move to force recounts in the Presidential election in three states; Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  The move, endorsed and supported by Madame Clinton, received breathless coverage from a corrupt mainstream media that is still in deep shock over the defeat of their globalist apparatchik.

What the instigator of this futile move, Mrs. Clinton and the media do not understand is that they are doing Donald Trump and the American people a huge favor.  Yes, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who is formally calling for the recounts, has collected millions of dollars from grieving leftists across the country.  She is building a donor file that will enable her to pay for the recounts but also form a funding base with which she and her ilk can attack the few remaining rational people inside the Democrat Party structure.  So, thank you, Jill Stein, for seizing the opportunity to build infrastructure that will push the Democrat Party further to the Left and over the cliff.

But the benefits don’t stop there.  Given the cumbersome process of recounting millions of votes in three large, industrial states, it is possible that the mandated meeting of the Electoral College on December 19 will fail to elect a President.  With the 46 votes of the three states not being counted, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton will receive the required 270 votes.  So, what happens then?

In early January when the 115th Congress is sworn into office, one of the first orders of business will be the election of President and Vice-President.  The Senate is sure to elect Mike Pence and the House is a lock to elect Donald Trump.  But, look at how Trump will be elected.  Each state gets one vote and a winner must get 26 votes.  So, how many votes will Trump get?  There are 30 states that voted for Trump that have Republican majorities in their delegation.  There are two more states, Colorado and Virginia, where a majority of the delegation is Republican but the state voted for Clinton.  So, assuming Colorado and Virginia are let off the hook, Donald Trump will be elected President with 30 votes to Clinton’s maximum possible of 18 votes.

Some will say this is a useless exercise, but I disagree.  This is how the Founders intended it to be.  The Executive is not elected by majority vote, it is elected by the states.  The Congressional vote will show in stark detail that there are sovereign states that make up the United States; that despite eight years of Obama working to “transform” the situation, we are not and never were a nation ruled over by an executive tyrant.  This demonstration to the people is a tremendous opportunity to drive home the point that we are a federal republic and what that means.  So, thank you Jill Stein, for giving us the ultimate “teachable moment” to destroy the concept of the totalitarian unitary state.

And finally, the venal attempt to stall the formal election process and rake in millions of dollars from deluded partisans has one additional benefit to the country.  There have been literally thousands of articles and opinion pieces published claiming that Donald Trump must not “go too far,” that he must let Clinton off the hook for her multiple felonies, that he can in fact work with the structure of the Democrat Party.  All he needs to do, this simpering line of “advice” goes, is play nice, give the globalists something, don’t rock the boat.  The grassroots — the tens of millions of Americans who elected Trump and hate the professional GOP — will just have to sit down and shut up.  We, the “professionals” know what is best.

Jill Stein, and by her aggressive posture forcing Hillary Clinton to join her, have shown Donald Trump and the American people that the left and their internationalist-masters have no intent to give one inch.  They have one goal, the destruction of Donald Trump and the people who stand with him.  America is their target and enemy. Even a child can see that exporting tens of millions of jobs, importing millions of illegal aliens to lower wages and corrupt our systems, and slavish adherence to a globalist agenda of surrender of nationhood is nothing more than suicide.

By making this contest stark and clear, Jill Stein has undercut the whispering snakes that would pollute the Trump administration’s thinking.  So, for exposing the truth of the real battle, thank you, Jill Stein.

So, let Stein and her radical leftist cronies collect millions of dollars because most of it will be deployed against the Democrat Party structure.  Let her force the election into the House of Representatives.  The people will get a lesson in federalism that otherwise would never have been available.  And let the globalists make clear to Donald Trump and his incoming Administration the true nature of the fight.  It will only put more steel — U.S. made by the way — into their resolve.  So, for all of these reasons, Thank you, Jill Stein, keep it up.

SOURCE

************************

In the Proud Tradition of Leftist Domestic Terrorism…

Water is wet. The Sun rises in the east. And large swaths of the Left engage in heinous acts of violence in the name of politics.

For our purposes here today, we’ll ignore the 94 million or so people Communism has murdered around the world. This is about the domestic Left.

We’ll begin just after the Civil War – with the Democrat Party’s creation of the Ku Klux Klan. A racist outfit that murdered and terrorized blacks and sought to overthrow southern Republican governments.

Let us move forward to the radical 1960s. With the creation of groups like the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground (ne the Weathermen). Who engaged in murder and mayhem of all sorts.

The Weather Underground liked planting bombs in places like police stations and the Pentagon. Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers ran in the same Chicago political circles as current outgoing Democrat President Barack Obama.

In the modern era, we have an evolving amalgam of violent Leftist entities. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have each engaged in…un-peaceful activities. The protests of candidate Donald Trump and now President-elect Trump haven’t been pleasant.

Which brings us to today – and the lovely expanses of North Dakota. Well, they were lovely – until the Left arrived.

Currently underway in the Flickertail State is a fracking petroleum revolution. Thanks to capitalism and its industry creations, we are extracting massive amounts of oil from the shale fields.

But we need to get that oil somewhere – hence the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The four state governments through which it will travel and the federal government have all already approved it.

So it’s good to go, right? Of course not – because we have the Left. Who have engaged in all manner of actions to block DAPLs construction. They have of course filed a lawsuit (because if there’s one thing the Left has more of than violent actors – it’s lawyers).

But that wasn’t near enough – so they are physically blocking the construction site. And are oft doing so in very, very violent fashion: “(I)nvestigators say they have found materials behind the protest line used to make Molotov cocktails, including 1-pound propane cylinders, glass bottles and rocks.”

Peaceful. How about this?: “(P)olice released a statement saying that the protesters ‘attempted to flank and attack the law enforcement line from the west,’ describing their actions as ‘very aggressive.’…Law officers were there to keep protesters from crossing the bridge, which the sheriff’s department said was closed for safety reasons ‘due to damage caused after protesters set numerous fires’ on it in a separate incident.…”

Tranquil. How about this?: “’Any suggestion that this was a peaceful protest is false. This was more like a riot than a protest,’ said Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier. ‘Individuals crossed onto private property and accosted private security officers with wooden posts and flag poles.’”

Sounds an awful lot like domestic terrorism. But let’s check the Patriot Act definition:

“(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;

“(B)appear to be intended—(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping;”

Yep. The Leftist DAPL protestors are in fact engaged in domestic terrorism.

The latest installment in a long, proud tradition of Leftist domestic terrorism.

Peace, Man.

SOURCE

*************************

Populist-Nationalist Tide Rolls On

Now that the British have voted to secede from the European Union and America has chosen a president who has never before held public office, the French appear to be following suit.

In Sunday's runoff to choose a candidate to face Marine Le Pen of the National Front in next spring's presidential election, the center-right Republicans chose Francois Fillon in a landslide.

While Fillon sees Margaret Thatcher as a role model in fiscal policy, he is a socially conservative Catholic who supports family values, wants to confront Islamist extremism, control immigration, restore France's historic identity and end sanctions on Russia.

"Russia poses no threat to the West," says Fillon. But if not, the question arises, why NATO? Why are U.S. troops in Europe?

As Le Pen is favored to win the first round of the presidential election and Fillon the second in May, closer Paris-Putin ties seem certain. Europeans themselves are pulling Russia back into Europe, and separating from the Americans.

Next Sunday, Italy holds a referendum on constitutional reforms backed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. If the referendum, trailing in the polls, fails, says Renzi, he will resign.

Opposing Renzi is the secessionist Northern League, the Five Star Movement of former comedian Beppe Grillo, and the Forza Italia of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a pal of Putin's.

"Up to eight of Italy's troubled banks risk failure," if Renzi's government falls, says the Financial Times. One week from today, the front pages of the Western press could be splashing the newest crisis of the EU.

In Holland, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders, on trial for hate speech for urging fewer Moroccan immigrants, is running first or close to it in polls for the national election next March.

Meanwhile, the door to the EU appears to be closing for Muslim Turkey, as the European Parliament voted to end accession talks with Ankara and its autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In welcoming Muslim immigrants, Germany's Angela Merkel no longer speaks for Europe, even as she is about to lose her greatest ally, Barack Obama.

Not only Europe but the whole world President-elect Trump is about to inherit seems in turmoil, with old regimes and parties losing their hold, and nationalist, populist and rightist forces rising.

SOURCE

****************************

A Great Candidate for Secretary of State — John Bolton

Donald Trump has begun fleshing out his Cabinet and has made a series of tough choices that will not only help determine his success, but the future of the country. So far, so good.
One candidate for Secretary of State stands out as singularly capable of helping President Trump make America great again: former UN Ambassador John Bolton.

He is an experienced and principled public servant and diplomat - a brilliant advocate for freedom, with a proven record of putting America first as it leads the world.

John Bolton also knows how to compel the State Department bureaucracy to carry out presidential direction. Absent that, its denizens will sabotage Mr. Trump at every turn.

Consequently, they and their allies will make a Bolton confirmation process difficult. But it is far better to fight them now, than under some less-capable Secretary throughout a Trump presidency.

SOURCE

**************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************

Proud Trump voter, crybaby losers of the left notwithstanding

By Rick Manning

I proudly voted for Trump and am tired of the losers in the election trying to discredit me and my vote.

Here is the deal.  Our nation has not had more than 4 percent economic growth since China got permanent normal trade relations and joined the World Trade Organization in 2000.  According to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis in the 47 years from 1953 and 2000 the U.S. economy experienced 4 percent or higher growth in almost half of those years.  Since 2005, our nation has not even achieved a modest 3 percent GDP growth, experiencing the slowest ten-year period of growth since the Great Depression.  If 2016 continues on its current poor trajectory of 1.7 percent annualized growth, the period between 2007 and 2016 will be the worst ten-years since record keeping began, including the terrible 1930s.

But the new normal Obama-Bush economy isn’t just about numbers. It is about the millions of people aged 16-64 who have dropped out of the workforce over the past decade.  A quick fact, if labor participation of people 16-64 had remained the same as in 1997, the September unemployment rate would have been 9.8 percent instead of the reported 5 percent.  This jump represents seven million Americans who are now out of the workforce compared to twenty years ago demonstrating the hidden despair behind the topline unemployment numbers.

I supported Trump because he challenges the new normal resulting from the past thirty years that has caused stagnant wages, lowered expectations and the destruction of formerly thriving industrial America on the altar of bad trade deals, too much regulation and uncompetitive labor conditions.

I support Trump because he will work to make America economically competitive through lowering our nation’s highest corporate tax rate in the world and repatriating stranded corporate profits to be reinvested in the U.S.,  He will also end the deliberate subversion of the U.S. economy by environmental regulations designed to drive up the prices for electricity driving the green cost of manufacturing domestically up so high that it is cheaper to ship products here from distant lands than to make them in places like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

I support Trump because he will break the stranglehold of the politically connected and the establishment that does their bidding for a price on the government. A stranglehold that results in domestically produced, inexpensive lightbulbs being temporarily outlawed while more expensive, profitable bulbs produced in China were forced into the marketplace, ending hundreds of jobs by the time Congress got around to defunding it.

I support Trump because he will reinforce our nation’s relations with friends like Great Britain and Israel, while holding governments like those in Iran and China honestly accountable. He will build the already authorized wall and fence along the U.S.-Mexican border and seek to enforce our nation’s immigration laws, a welcome change from the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil approach to our southern border.

I support Trump because all lives matter, and the foundation of the United States is built around the ideal that justice is blind must be restored in order for our legal system to have any legitimacy.

I support Trump because terrorism is a real threat and the almost passive acceptance of acts of terrorism by followers of Islam reveals a dangerous national blind spot that must be eliminated.

And I support Trump because the U.S. Navy is down to the fewest number of ships since World War I, and he will build it back up to 350 ships using American steel and highly skilled American workers.  America’s economic and national security depend upon a robust Navy, and a President Trump understands that basic fact and will remedy the poor decisions of the past.

I am not ashamed of standing up for constitutional, limited government principles and I am proud to have voted for Donald Trump for President, and the crybaby losers of the left cannot change that with all of their false narratives about what this presidency means.

A Trump presidency may just be our nation’s last chance for the 21st century to be the next American century.  And the extension of freedom that results when America is strong, benefits the entire world.

I am proud to have stood for freedom through my vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States and so should everyone else who voted for him.

SOURCE

****************************

Retired Gen. James Mattis is reportedly front-runner to be Trump's secretary of defense

He has been much attacked by the Left so a story from the archives about the character of the man might help:

A couple of months ago, when I told General Krulak, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps, now the chair of the Naval Academy Board of Visitors, that we were having General Mattis speak this evening, he said, “Let me tell you a Jim Mattis story.”

General Krulak said, when he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, every year, starting about a week before Christmas, he and his wife would bake hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Christmas cookies. They would package them in small bundles.  Then on Christmas day, he would load his vehicle.

At about 4 a.m., General Krulak would drive himself to every Marine guard post in the Washington-Annapolis-Baltimore area and deliver a small package of Christmas cookies to whatever Marines were pulling guard duty that day.

He said that one year, he had gone down to Quantico as one of his stops to deliver Christmas cookies to the Marines on guard duty. He went to the command center and gave a package to the lance corporal who was on duty.

 He asked, “Who’s the officer of the day?” The lance corporal said, “Sir, it’s Brigadier General Mattis.” And General Krulak said, “No, no, no. I know who General Mattis is. I mean, who’s the officer of the day today, Christmas day?”

The lance corporal, feeling a little anxious, said, “Sir, it is Brigadier General Mattis.”

 General Krulak said that, about that time, he spotted in the back room a cot, or a daybed. He said, “No, Lance Corporal. Who slept in that bed last night?” The lance corporal said, “Sir, it was Brigadier General Mattis.”

About that time, General Krulak said that General Mattis came in, in a duty uniform with a sword, and General Krulak said, “Jim, what are you doing here on Christmas day? Why do you have duty?”

General Mattis told him that the young officer who was scheduled to have duty on Christmas day had a family, and General Mattis decided it was better for the young officer to spend Christmas Day with his family, and so he chose to have duty on Christmas Day.

General Krulak said, “That’s the kind of officer that Jim Mattis is.”

The story above was told by Dr. Albert C. Pierce, the Director of the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at The United States Naval Academy.

SOURCE

****************************

Liberals are going to lose their minds over these quotes from General Mattis

President-elect Donald Trump is hard at work picking the people who will run his administration, and the man he’s reportedly tapped to head up the Pentagon is none other than retired Marine Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis.

A retired four-star general and former head of both U.S. Joint Forces and U.S. Central Command, Mattis is undoubtedly qualified for the position of defense secretary. But perhaps even more legendary than his storied 44-year career is his ability to be quoted.

Liberals may just lose their minds when they hear some of these gems:

    “You cannot allow any of your people to avoid the brutal facts. If they start living in a dream world, it’s going to be bad.”

    “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

    “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

    “The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.”

    “In this age, I don’t care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are, if you cannot create harmony — even vicious harmony — on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete. We have got to have officers who can create harmony across all those lines.”

SOURCE

****************************

Leftists can't help but fawn over the deceased dictator

Fidel Castro, who ruled Cuba for more than 57 years with an iron fist (notwithstanding his passing power to his brother Raul in 2008), is likely finding his current accommodations a bit warmer than Cuba. But Barack Obama, who wields power as if he wishes to imitate the Cuban dictator, almost mourned the latter’s loss. After all, Obama has always gravitated toward radical Marxist mentors.

Pre-Castro, the U.S. and Cuba enjoyed friendly trade relations. Castro completely destroyed the island’s prosperity, though. The U.S. embargoed Cuba, seeking to isolate and starve the Castro regime, but Fidel found friends in the Soviet Union and Venezuela. After Castro seized power, John F. Kennedy launched the embarrassingly failed coup attempt at the Bay of Pigs, which led to the ensuing Cuban missile crisis involving the Soviets. Nuclear war was only narrowly avoided. Fast forward to 2014, and along comes Obama to normalize relations with Cuba. Perhaps that explains his statement.

“At this time of Fidel Castro’s passing,” Obama said in an official statement, “we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. We know that this moment fills Cubans — in Cuba and in the United States — with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.”

Worse, Obama said, “We offer condolences to Fidel Castro’s family.”

Aside from that last outrage, clearly, Obama’s statement was meant to be ambiguous. “Powerful emotions”? Yes, ignorant academics may shed a tear for Castro, but the people he brutally oppressed have somewhat different emotions. Castro “altered the course of individual lives”? Yes, if by “altered” Obama meant ended. “History will judge”? Yes, it will, but why wait for “history”? We already know the extent of Castro’s evil. We can judge him now, and have been judging him since he took over the Caribbean island in 1959.

As The Wall Street Journal briefly recaps, “Castro took power on New Year’s Day in 1959 serenaded by the Western media for toppling dictator Fulgencio Batista and promising democracy. He soon revealed that his goal was to impose Communist rule. He exiled clergy, took over Catholic schools and expropriated businesses. Firing squads and dungeons eliminated rivals and dissenters. The terror produced a mass exodus.”

That exodus includes many Cubans in Miami, hundreds of whom took to the streets to celebrate Fidel’s demise. The refugees included the parents of U.S. Senator Marco Rubio. “Sadly,” Rubio said in a statement, “Fidel Castro’s death does not mean freedom for the Cuban people or justice for the democratic activists, religious leaders, and political opponents he and his brother have jailed and persecuted. The dictator has died, but the dictatorship has not.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan hoped for the death of that dictatorship: “Now that Fidel Castro is dead, the cruelty and oppression of his regime should die with him.”

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump’s statement was also far more appropriate than Obama’s: “Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.” Trump also noted that “Cuba remains a totalitarian island,” but that he is “absolutely” willing to undo Obama’s work to normalize relations with Cuba.

More HERE

****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************

Trump has saved us -- temporarily? -- from a mental Gulag

A useful technique for anaesthetizing the individual citizen and rendering him compliant is the erasure of authentic historical knowledge. We’ve remarked the success of this approach in the U.S. with the “history from below” or “people’s history” movement, associated with Howard Zinn, and the foregrounding of a bowdlerized version of Islamic history in American schools.

Canada is no different. Eric McGeer, author of Words of Valediction and Remembrance: Canadian Epitaphs of the Second World War, writes: “In my last years of high school teaching I was increasingly infuriated and disgusted at the portrayal of Canada in the history textbooks assigned for use in our courses. There was no sense of gratitude in the textbooks, no empathy with the people of the past or an attempt to see them in their own terms, no sense of the effort people made to create one of the few truly liveable societies on earth.

You would have thought that this country was nothing more than a racist, bigoted, this or that-phobic hotbed. My first lesson involved taking the book and dropping it into the waste paper basket and advising the students to do the same.”  The study of history, McGeer concludes, is nothing now but a progressive morality tale and a mechanism of social engineering. Sounds a lot like Title IX. Pride in one’s nation, its accomplishments and sacrifices, is contra-indicated. There is more than one way of burning the flag.

The center-right consensus that has characterized Western nations has been under attack for some considerable time as nation after nation in the once liberal West gravitates progressively leftward. Robert Conquest’s Second of his Three Laws of Politics states that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” The consequence of Conquest’s Law is, inevitably, what Robert Michels in Political Parties called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which formulates how democratic institutions tend to succumb to the rule of an elite—in our day, a progressivist camarilla that controls government policy and media outlets, and harnesses the energies of dissenting associations and cabals. In many countries, the democratic process has become or is on the road to becoming a mere formality.

The oligarchic agenda can be detected in the disastrous nationalization of the health care system; the decadence of an academy which indoctrinates rather than educates; the rise of destructive feminism and the feminization of the culture; the transgendering of everyday life—in Canada, for example, Bill C-16 has been tabled, making “gender expression” a prohibited ground of discrimination and potentially mandating non-binary pronouns such as zhi or hir, as is already the case in New York City where astronomical fines are levied for contravention; the special status ascribed to the incursions of anti-democratic Islam; the “abolition of the family,” as Marx and Engels urged in The Communist Manifesto; and the regulatory strangling of the free market economy and the conjoint attrition of the middle class.

Additionally, the leftist project is materially facilitated by the growing prevalence of kangaroo courts run by committed activists of every conceivable stripe and in which no provision whatsoever is made to assist those too often falsely accused of discrimination or being in violation of some obscure code or policy of sanctioned conduct. The judgments handed down against those who have offended the sensibilities of favored identity groups will often involve harshly punitive forms of retribution that may cost a defendant his employment and his livelihood.

A Romanian friend who suffered through Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in his home country tells me that in many ways the situation in the “freedom loving” West is actually worse. In Romania, as in the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, most people knew that the regime was founded on lies and that the media were corrupt, time-serving institutions. Here, on the contrary, people tend to believe that the government is relatively, if not entirely, trustworthy, that the judiciary is impartial, and that the media actually report the news.

Citizens are therefore susceptible to mission creep and are piecemeal deceived into a condition of indenture to socialist governance, an activist judiciary, a disinformative, hireling press corps, and left-wing institutions. People will vote massively for the Liberal Party in Canada and the Democrats in the U.S., not realizing they are voting themselves into bondage, penury and stagnation.

The process operates insensibly and takes longer to embed itself into the cultural mainstream, but the result is alarmingly effective and durable. My friend has never read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or George Orwell’s 1984, but his layman’s insights and practical experience bear out Hayek’s scholarly analysis and Orwell’s dire warnings.

A totalitarian regime will control its citizens through propaganda, censorship, and outright violence, modes of oppression that are at least publicly demonstrable, evident to most. But knowing that the enchainment of the spirit is ultimately more reliable than the enchainment of the flesh, a democratic polity veering towards oligarchy will focus on propaganda and censorship as well, but in a far more subtle form. It will function mainly through public shaming rituals, social ostracism, rigid speech codes, Orwellian disinformation, and legal or quasi-legal assault. It does not need to depend on physical violence.

Fear of social rejection, the lure of groupthink, the pestilence of political correctness controlling what one may say and think, public apathy, historical ignorance, and especially the Damoclean sword of selective hiring, job dismissal, and financial reprisal go a long way to subdue a people to the will of its masters and consign them to a Gulag that may be less observable a such, but one that is nonetheless socially and economically crippling to individuals, families and businesses.

In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political pottage.

SOURCE

****************************

The Left have no shame and no humane values

Even a brutal Communist butcher and dictator is OK if he is of the Left.  Power is their only value and they will say anything to get it

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under fire for hailing Fidel Castro as 'larger than life' and a 'legendary revolutionary and orator' after he died on Friday.

Trudeau praised the former Cuban president in a tribute that focused on his family's close ties to Castro and made no mention of his history of ruthless suppression.

'It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba's longest serving President,' Trudeau said in his statement, which was released on Saturday.

'While a controversial figure, both Mr Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for "el Comandante'".

Trudeau celebrated Castro's 'significant improvements' to Cuba's education and healthcare systems and said his own father was 'very proud to call him a friend'.

'On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr Castro,' he concluded.

'We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.'

Trudeau's father met Castro in 1976, during a controversial trip that took place at the height of the Cold War.

SOURCE

************************

Some fun



Wonderful to see the Leftist knowalls prove that they know nothing.

************************

Trumping the Media: Donald Continually Confounds the MSM

"The Master Persuader"

Looking back on it now, who do you think provided the best commentary on the run-up to the election?

And a related question: who has provided the most insightful commentary on the aftermath, i.e. "Why Trump Happened," "What His Victory Means," "What the Protesters and Crybullies Want"?

It's amusing now to replay the scenes of those Important People who assured us that Trump, the clown, could never win. My favorite headline was from The Nation: "Relax, Donald Trump Can't Win."

But if the MSM was almost exclusively a source of schadenfreude, who was out there telling the truth?

There were several percipient commentators. But I want to mention one who may be overlooked because the public regards him as an entertainer, not a sage. I mean Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. Adams, at his blog, has been providing some of the most original and most penetrating commentary on the whole Trump phenomenon.

I was, I admit, a little taken aback when I first encountered his description of Trump as a "Master Persuader" (see here, for example, or here), but the more I think about it, the more right I think he is. Trump on the stump was not articulate in any traditional sense. He was repetitious, digressive, given to stumbling about in sentence fragments. But he honed a message that resonated deeply with the voters.

Adams noted the following in a column posted yesterday:

"If you believe Trump’s skill for persuasion wasn’t the key variable in his win, you have to imagine some other candidate beating Clinton with the same set of policies as Trump. Personally, I can’t imagine it"

I commend Adams' blog to you: among other things, he shows that the people who are protesting against Trump are not really protesting against Trump. They're protesting against a hallucination they call "Trump" that has almost nothing to do with the man who is now the president-elect.

"How," Adams asks, "do you explain away Trump’s election if you think you are smart and you think you are well-informed and you think Trump is OBVIOUSLY a monster?"

You solve for that incongruity by hallucinating -- literally -- that Trump supporters KNOW Trump is a monster and they PREFER the monster. In this hallucination, the KKK is not a nutty fringe group but rather a symbol of how all Trump supporters must feel. (They don’t. Not even close.)

In a rational world it would be obvious that Trump supporters include lots of brilliant and well-informed people. That fact -- as obvious as it would seem -- is invisible to the folks who can’t even imagine a world in which their powers of perception could be so wrong. To reconcile their world, they have to imagine all Trump supporters as defective in some moral or cognitive way, or both."

I think this correct. And I am delighted to see Trump circumventing that hallucination so skillfully.

Forget about the Soros-funded protests: those are already dissipating. Perhaps there will be a brief recrudescence at the inauguration, but the street action is already looking sillier and sillier as Trump is acting more and more presidential.

The really important action is with respect to the MSM. Just yesterday, Trump convened an off-the-record meeting with anchors and executives from the top five networks to complain about the unfair coverage he had been receiving.

CNN reported that this meant Trump was off to a "rocky start" with the media. That's hilarious. Why? Because no one cares what CNN thinks about its relationship with Donald Trump.

To prove the point, Trump circumvented the media altogether yesterday when he released via YouTube a clip of him outlining some of the things he hoped to accomplished in his first 100 days. It all revolved around a "simple core principle," i.e., "putting America first."

What a novel idea, but not one that Wolf Blitzer or Chris Matthews can get his head around.

SOURCE

**************************

The latest from two fun ladies



CHRIS BRAND has had a relapse and we may well lose him this time.  I am upset at the thought of losing such an independent mind

****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************

Trump brings in the billionaires

The Democrats are going to pick at this and claim that Trump does not stand for the little guy after all.  But the point is that Trump is bringing in high achievers, not inexperienced political hacks.  He is bringing in people of known high competence who will get results.

And since they are already rich they are not doing it for the salary. And being already rich, they will be very hard to corrupt.  This may be the least corrupt administration for a long time -- just what Trump promised.

And no-one can say that they did not know Trump had rich friends.  He has long been one of the best known people in America -- and known to be a rich man who hobnobs with other rich people.


Donald Trump is used to being surrounded by rich people, but the squad of billionaires he is lining up to serve in his first cabinet is extraordinary even by his standards.

Hedge funders, heiresses, bankruptcy bankers and baseball barons are being tipped for top positions in the new administration, leading to deep concerns about conflicts of interest and the expectation of a bumpy ride when they face confirmation hearings in the Senate.

“Donald Trump said during the campaign that he doesn’t like hanging out with rich people,” said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia. “We’re discovering that’s not really true. We’ve had wealthy people in almost every cabinet, but I don’t believe we’ve ever had so many.”

SOURCE

************************

Trump inspires second thoughts from a British libertarian

by Sean Gabb

The election of Donald Trump took nearly everyone by surprise. For some of us, it was a moment of joy, for others a terrible shock. I was in the first category. The British Government was in the second. From Theresa May downward, the Ministers had spent a year heaping scorn on Mr Trump. The scale and nature of their insults will not be quickly forgotten. Their earliest punishment appears to be that they have been told to approach Mr Trump only through Nigel Farage. I have no doubt there will be other humiliations.

Part of me is delighted. I like Donald Trump. I like Nigel Farage. Even if she is better than David Cameron, I remain suspicious of and hostile to Mrs May. Let her and her ministers eat dirt for a few weeks, and then come to a more reasonable view of British interests. All this does, however, leave part of me uncomfortable. This article, I must warn you, will be more than usually solipsistic. On the other hand, I have always tried to be intellectually honest, and I feel obliged at least to describe my present difficulty.

During the twenty years or so till last Tuesday, I held a set of opinions that – I always grant – may have been wrong, but that were internally consistent. They went something like this:

The fundamental interests of every country are the same. These are to give as much freedom and security to their citizens as local circumstances will allow, while living at peace with all other countries. What disturbs this view of the world is that interest and ability do not always coincide. The United States has been able to dominate the world, and it has. Britain is no longer able to do this, but has been able to act above its inherent power through becoming a satellite of the United States. I found both these facts irritating before 1989. After then, America became the home of political correctness and neoconservatism. For me, therefore, America became The Great Satan. Any British Government committed to our fundamental interests should begin by breaking off relations with the United States. In the meantime, I was even willing to see membership of the European Union as a useful counterweight to American power.

I do not know what a Trump Presidency will be really like. But it is possible that the opinions I have just summarised are suddenly obsolete. It is possible that, within a few weeks, America will cease being The Great Satan, and become the seat of the God-Emperor-Daddy. I already find myself in the same position as leftists did towards France in 1789, or towards Russia in 1917. It may, then, be that you can strip out all the Powellite rhetoric, and I shall be revealed as nothing more than a dissident Anglospherist. My only difference with the people I have been denouncing for a generation is nothing more than that I want a different American Empire.

There is some truth in this. The government of my own country is now at the head of the neoconservative interest. I shall certainly be relieved if stiff orders come out of Washington, and Theresa May and Boris Johnson go scuttling off to Moscow to patch up their differences with Mr Putin. But, if the facts are changed, my principles are not.

No hard reset button was pressed last week in America. The country will not revert to what it was supposed to become in the 1780s. America will remain the most powerful country in the world, with interests on every continent. It may conceive and pursue these in a more rational manner. But its interests are unlikely to become perfectly aligned with those of my own country. For this reason, our interests depend, in the long term, on close relations with France and Germany, and an adequate relationship with Russia. If we can add to this friendly relations with America, that will be a bonus.

I turn to the matter of what Mr Trump is already doing to Mrs May. For a long time, the British Establishment has been a wholly-owned franchise of the military-industrial complex in America, taken in its widest sense. British Governments are neoconservative because that is what Washington wanted. They are politically correct for the same reason. If American pressure is not to be removed, but merely changed in a better direction, I shall be grateful for that. I shall be grateful in the short term. In the longer term, I still want full independence. I will put up with a more sensible master when his bailiffs are told to go easy on the whip. The final ambition remains no master at all.

I turn now to how I view the “Anglosphere.” There is no doubt that England and America are rather in the position of Siamese twins. We share a language. We share a culture. Speaking for myself, I have as many American friends as English. When I go abroad, and am among Americans, we always find ourselves part of a single group, almost forgetting differences of passport, and sharing jokes about the foreigners we are among. Always taking account of our different weight, what was done to the world after 1989 was a joint British-American enterprise. The intellectual resistance to this has been no less a joint British-American enterprise – again taking account of our different weights. Libertarians and conservatives in our two countries have not merely worked together over the past few decades – we have belonged to the same movement, and we have worked against the same enemy, though in two different locations. My American friends rejoiced when the British Establishment got a bloody nose last June. We now rejoice that Mr Trump is to be the next President. Our struggle has been, and is, the same. Our victories are their victories. Their victories are ours.

I am not sure if I have made myself as clear as I want to be. Perhaps I need to think more about the events of this year before I can become as self-assured again as I have been for the past third of a century. It remains, however, that I am delighted that the uncertainty I describe has become necessary. All those American leftists last week, their faces like burst balloons, were an early Christmas present. The strained faces of Theresa May and her ministers are of exactly the same kind.

I look forward to Mrs May’s first trip to Washington next year, and I shall have a good laugh when she prostrates herself in the appropriate manner before the God-Emperor-Daddy. It will be a victory for me and everyone else in the world who wants the best for England and America in particular, and for a suffering humanity in general.

https://thelibertarianalliance.com/2016/11/14/donald-trump-and-english-patriotism/


*****************************

Winning Coalition: Married, Mature, Church-Going, Self-Sufficient

Assume, for the next few minutes, that you are a Machiavellian political strategist.  You do not care about the liberty and prosperity of our nation or of future generations. The only thing you want to ensure is that all American presidents elected after Donald Trump are liberals in the mold of Hillary Clinton.

So, what sort of cultural and demographic changes would you like to see in the United States?

An examination of the network exit poll taken last Tuesday might give you a general idea about whom your most likely future supporters will be - and it might not match the model of the liberal coalition the liberal media promotes.

Is marriage an issue? Yes.  Among unmarried voters, according to the exit poll published by CNN, Clinton beat Trump 55 percent to 38 percent. But among married voters, Trump beat Clinton 53 percent to 43 percent. When Americans marry and stay married it hurts the liberal cause.

Is generational change an issue? Yes.  Among voters 44 and younger, Clinton beat Trump 52 percent to 40 percent. But among voters 45 and older, Trump beat Clinton 53 percent to 44 percent.

When Americans live to middle age and longer, it hurts the liberal cause.

Is upward mobility an issue? Yes. Among voters with incomes of $49,999 or less, Clinton beat Trump, 52 percent to 41 percent. But among voters with incomes of $50,000 or more, Trump beat Clinton 49 percent to 47 percent.

Trump's largest margin, among the six income brackets listed in the exit poll published by CNN, was among those who earn between $50,000 and $99,999. Among these voters, Trump beat Clinton 50 percent to 46 percent. But he also beat her 48 percent to 46 percent among voters earning $250,000 or more.  When voters make more money - attaining a middle-class income or higher - it hurts the liberal cause.

Is where you live an issue? Yes. Among voters in urban areas, Clinton beat Trump 59 percent to 35 percent. But among voters in the suburbs, Trump beat Clinton 50 percent to 45 percent; and among voters in rural areas, he beat her 62 percent to 34 percent. When voters move to the suburbs and the country, it hurts the liberal cause.

Does faith play a role in our national destiny? Yes. Among voters who attend religious services only a few times a year, Clinton squeaked by Trump 48 percent to 47 percent. And among voters who never attend religious services, she stomped him 62 percent to 31 percent.

But among voters who attend religious services monthly, Trump beat Clinton 49 percent to 46 percent. And among those who attend religious services once a week or more, he stomped her 56 percent to 40 percent. When voters practice their faith, it hurts the liberal cause.

Now, imagine an unmarried 22-year-old, who lives in a city, works part-time making $20,000 per year, and has not gone to a religious service in four years. How would that person be likely to vote?  Suppose, then, this same person gets married, starts working full-time and overtime, earns more than $50,000 per year, buys a home in the suburbs, and regularly attends religious services with the spouse and children.

How would this person be likely to vote then?

But what if this person followed another path? They married and then divorced, decided it was not worth it working full-time, went on food stamps and never went to church.

The ultimate question is not how a person will vote, but what will give them a fulfilling life. It is not what persons will hold political office in United States of America, but what values will keep us free and prosperous.

The same values that made this nation great can unite this nation again. They are family, faith, hard work and the desire to live a long and good life without government standing in your way.

SOURCE

****************************

From my twitter feed:

Ann Coulter: Today, the media take a brief time-out from worrying about Trump being a dictator to praise Fidel Castro.

Donald J. Trump: The Democrats, when they incorrectly thought they were going to win, asked that the election night tabulation be accepted. Not so anymore!

Paul Joseph Watson ‏on the death of Castro: What we leaned today: Killing political dissidents, interning gays, & being a dictator for 50 years is fine, so long as you're left wing.

**************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************

Trump's "backdowns"

Trump was so vague and contradictory during his campaigns -- first for the GOP nomination and then for Prez -- that one can argue that his recent "backdowns" are just his general vagueness and nothing new.  His decision not to prosecute Hillary, however, is clearly a change. So why?

He has actually told us why.  He wants to bring the nation together and for that reason he has been extremely conciliatory.  He has been as nice as he can to everybody.  And given the big guns in the media, the bureaucracy and the legal system he might see it as simply safer to lay off Hillary. Push the Donks to the wall and you never know what they will come up with.  Bribes and threats to members of the electoral college?  A cinch.  And that is just the start.

And there are two general reasons for him to go easy:

1).  He is a most experienced businessman and if you want the best result in business you have to do all that you reasonably can to keep people sweet.  To be corny, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

2). Nobody seems to be mentioning this  but Trump is himself one of the establishment.  He may not previously have stood for elective office but he knows most of the main players of old and has donated to some of their electoral campaigns. He is one of the best known people in America.  He has long been a celebrity. His marriages and divorces have for decades been front-page news.  There is a reason why he is known as "The Donald".

And that is gold.  People WANT to know and be seen with a celebrity and Trump is a celebrity.  He can hobnob with anybody he wants.  He just has to buy them a flash dinner at one of his establishments and the flashbulbs will flash.  And lots of people crave those flashes.  And guess what?  His beloved and devoted daughter Ivanka is close friends with whom?  Chelsea Clinton.  Would you want to put the mother of your beloved daughter's close friend in jail?

So I think it is clear why Hillary is off the hook. She was always going to be off the hook.

But what of his other backdowns?  Obamacare and the Paris climate agreement?  Again, as a good businessman he knows the value of compromise and he wants to be seen as fair.  "winner takes all" just generates resentment.  The way Obama and his minions pushed Obamacare through with out ANY GOP support is an example of where that approach leads.  All the effort they put in to get it though now looks like being a complete waste -- a cancelled legacy.  So Trump is looking for at least the appearance of compromise.

So what about Obamacare?  He has a clear mandate to abolish it and a majority in both houses who are mad keen to do so.  Any compromise he offers will therefore be greeted with relief.  He can look like the generous man in the middle who reconciles two deeply opposed parties -- And he has already said that he likes some provisions of Obamacare.

So my prediction is that he will negotiate with both sides of Congress to gut Obamacare but leave enough remnants for both sides to feel that they have been heard and been given something.  That should achieve what Obamacare could not:  A health insurance system that has at least a degree of bipartisan support -- making it resistant to much in the way of future changes. Something as hard-fought as health insurance reform is going to leave people with little appetite for further battles over it.  The new system is likely to win general acceptance as the best that can be done.  Australia has arrived at that point after similar long battles.

So what could he do with the Paris agreement?  There are two things

1). He could present it to the Senate for ratification, which is the legally correct thing to do.  The U.S. Congress as a whole has the great distinction of being the only legislature in the world to have skeptics in the majority and the Senate would certainly not endorse the Paris agreement.  It would thus lapse and Trump would not be to blame.  That blame would fall on the shoulders of the Senate, and they have broad shoulders.

2). He could do nothing.  He could accept the Paris agreement but just fail to enforce it.  Any time some action is demanded of him he could just say things like: "America comes first in my administration and I am not going to hit the coal miners of West Virginia again.  They have already suffered enough".  He could, in other words, always find some higher priority than to worry about global warming.  I think it is highly likely that he will do one of those two things, most likely the former.

So Trump's "backdowns" actually show his wisdom and experience.  People took him for an aggressive and ignorant fool but behind his facade was a cool thinker.  They made the same mistake with Ronald Reagan.

***********************

Some recent tweets:

From John Schindler:  "America lost its mind, electing a fraud and conman without any actual skills. All he had was media cover.  8 years later, we elected Trump'

Jason C. on the death of Castro: Many of the same Lefties that hyperventilate about Trump as a 'fascist' will tonight romanticize a dictator that used to send gays to camps.

*************************

People are hardwired to fall in love with partners who have a similar level of educational aptitude

The effect sizes noted in the journal abstract below are very small but that may reflect our still rudimentary ability to isolate the genes responsible for IQ.  The very weak tendency so far is for the evolution of a genetic elite

A study co-led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has found that people with genes for high educational achievement tend to marry, and have children with, people with similar DNA.

Humans generally do not choose their partners randomly, but rather mate 'assortatively', choosing people with similar traits. Among the highest ranking qualities people look for in a potential partner are intelligence and educational attainment.

While it is well known that humans mate assortatively in relation to education - people with similar education levels marry each other - this is one of the first studies to show that this has significance at a DNA level.

The researchers argue that this could increase genetic and social inequality in future generations, since children of couples who mate assortatively are more unequal genetically than those of people who mate more randomly.

The study, published in the journal Intelligence, was co-led by Dr David Hugh-Jones, from UEA's School of Economics, and Dr Abdel Abdellaoui, of the Department of Biological Psychology at VU University in The Netherlands.

They examined whether assortative mating for educational achievement could be detected in the DNA of approximately 1600 married or cohabiting couples in the UK. The sample was drawn from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, a survey that aims to be representative of the population.

Dr Hugh-Jones, a senior lecturer in economics, said: "Our findings show strong evidence for the presence of genetic assortative mating for education in the UK. The consequences of assortative mating on education and cognitive abilities are relevant for society, and for the genetic make-up and therefore the evolutionary development of subsequent generations.

"Assortative mating on inheritable traits that are indicative of socio-economic status, such as educational achievement, increases the genetic variance of characteristics in the population. This may increase social inequality, for example with respect to education or income.

"When growing social inequality is, partly, driven by a growing biological inequality, inequalities in society may be harder to overcome and the effects of assortative mating may accumulate with each generation."

The researchers used polygenic scores that predict educational attainment to see whether they predicted the partner's own educational attainment and polygenic score. They found that the scores correlated between partners and significantly predicted partners' educational outcome, for both sexes, in that individuals with a stronger genetic predisposition for higher educational achievement have partners who are more educated.

The researchers also tested whether their data could be explained by other factors, for example by people simply meeting their partners because they lived in the same county. They re-matched individuals with random partners within the same educational levels and geographical locations. However, they found that the scores of the original couples showed greater similarities than the randomly generated pairs, indicating significant genetic assortative mating for educational attainment regardless of educational level and geographic location.

SOURCE

Assortative mating on educational attainment leads to genetic spousal resemblance for polygenic scores

David Hugh-Jones et al.

Abstract

We examined whether assortative mating for educational attainment (“like marries like”) can be detected in the genomes of ~ 1600 UK spouse pairs of European descent. Assortative mating on heritable traits like educational attainment increases the genetic variance and heritability of the trait in the population, which may increase social inequalities. We test for genetic assortative mating in the UK on educational attainment, a phenotype that is indicative of socio-economic status and has shown substantial levels of assortative mating. We use genome-wide allelic effect sizes from a large genome-wide association study on educational attainment (N ~ 300 k) to create polygenic scores that are predictive of educational attainment in our independent sample (r = 0.23, p < 2 × 10− 16). The polygenic scores significantly predict partners' educational outcome (r = 0.14, p = 4 × 10− 8 and r = 0.19, p = 2 × 10− 14, for prediction from males to females and vice versa, respectively), and are themselves significantly correlated between spouses (r = 0.11, p = 7 × 10− 6). Our findings provide molecular genetic evidence for genetic assortative mating on education in the UK.

Intelligence, Volume 59, November–December 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2016.08.005

****************************

Stop vote-shaming Trump’s female supporters

The fact that 53% of white women voted for Trump really grinds feminists' mental gears

Since Donald Trump’s election last Tuesday, many have taken to the streets, not just in protest, but in mourning. The great and good were so convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win that, even after the fact, they simply couldn’t believe the result. Then the exit polls came, and with them the news that 53 per cent of white women had voted for Trump.

Clinton supporters on both sides of the pond lost their minds. ‘Most white women don’t want to be part of an intersectional feminist sisterhood. Most white women just want to be one of the guys. And we will all suffer for it’, wrote one American journalist, the morning after the vote. ‘Dear fellow white women: you had the personification of safe white liberal feminism to vote for. You STILL picked racist patriarchy’, tweeted one upset British columnist as the news rolled in. White women chose a misogynist, wrote an Irish Times columnist, ‘like slaves fluffing the pillows of their master’s rocking chair on his porch as he shouts abuse at them’.

White women are filled with self-hatred, an activist wrote: ‘White women understand hate. We have been hating ourselves for so long that self-hatred feels normal. We may well hate people of different skin colours or religious beliefs as well, but we hate ourselves more.’ Another American observer argued that it’s now clear that ‘far too many white women still see white men as their saviours’.

I could go on – there have been endless articles, tweets and public outpourings about how shameful it is that many female voters chose Trump over Clinton. Every woman quoted above claims to be a feminist, and yet they’ve denounced female Trump voters as selfish, traitors, blind idiots, slaves, self-haters. Supposedly progressive feminists argue that women have ‘internalised misogyny’ – that hatred towards women is so ingrained in their daily experience that they can’t help being brainwashed by it and then expressing it in the ballot box. Apparently Clinton voters were able to rise above this subconscious force.

Yes, Trump has said he wants to roll back women’s access to abortion; he’s been a pig in many of his comments about women; and he’s probably not the best candidate to argue for better childcare resources or maternity leave. But the idea that he will send every woman howling back to the dark ages is absurd; that smacks more of fearmongering than a serious feminism designed to criticise and challenge the new president.

White women didn’t vote for Trump because they hate themselves. The fact is, not every woman in the US is a card-carrying feminist. Not all college-educated women go to Harvard and scream at their professors for using the wrong pronoun. In fact, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out in Reason, Trump’s female fanbase was made up of mostly older white women, without a college degree, living in rural areas, ‘unlikely candidates to be reading progressive, feminist-focused, millennial publications. Who, exactly, are these impassioned public screeds aimed at white “female misogynists” supposed to sway?’

This election proved that asking women to vote on the basis of their gender, rather than their political ideas, doesn’t work. Clinton’s campaign was a vacuous insult to free-thinking women. Trump is certainly no champion of women’s liberation, but the rejection of Clinton’s vagina-voting sisterhood, which encouraged women to fall in line rather than think for themselves, nonetheless felt pretty good.

Forget the ‘betrayal’ by female Trump voters; the way middle-class media feminists like Caroline Criado-Perez, Polly Toynbee and Jessica Valenti have insulted ordinary women for their political beliefs is far more shameful. By claiming that female Trump voters are merely adhering to ‘the patriarchy’, or have internalised self-hatred, or are mentally enslaved by their men, these feminists strip women of agency. Rather than deal with the fact that some women don’t agree with them, and argue for what they believe in, they smear opposing views as stupid and blind. And rather than accept that politics doesn’t go your way unless you make a good case, they bury their heads in the sand and weep. As one celebrity feminist wrote: ‘Wednesday was a day of mourning. Thursday, too. Hell, I’m giving us till Sunday.’

The more feminism presents itself as a superior girls’ club, a ‘sisterhood’ which only welcomes women who toe the line, the faster it will descend into the dustbin of history. Maybe it’s about time.

SOURCE

************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************