Good looks and the Trump campaign

Two prominent figures in the Trump campaign are RFK Jr and JD Vance

In my judgment both are very good looking men in a manly way and will appeal to older female voters for that reason

Women do tend to base their vote on the looks of the candidate and Trump himself probably benefits from that to some extent. He is tall and has a very confident manner.

The female vote is however not monolithic -- With young single females leaning Left and older married women leaning conservative.

And let it be noted that on his first run Trump got 53% of the white female vote overall

Sorry, feminists

health

I have cancer and am taking a lot of medications that make me sleepy so will not be doing much blogging for a while

It is Palestine that is a poltical creation, not Israel

“This is not the end of the war … it is the beginning of the end,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the killing of Yahya Sinwar last week.

So, where and when did this all begin? Oddly, it started in Moscow in 1964. When will it end? It won’t, because it can’t. The Palestinian “leadership” won’t let it.

In 1964, the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti – KGB), was funding and sometimes organising various Marxist armies for national liberation around the world, and is believed to have come up with the idea of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. It reportedly even helpfully drew up a list of members and assisted with its charter.

This blended a disparate people – the Palestinians – and shaped their grievance into a policy calling for the destruction of Israel. At the time, Nikita Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had in recent years brutally suppressed unrest in Georgia and Poland, and a revolution in Hungary, while coming perilously close to superpower nuclear war in 1962. He wanted to destabilise Israel – indeed, eliminate it – and exert more power and influence across the Middle East. A common denominator in the region was a hatred of Jews (Khrushchev wasn’t keen on them either). He would give this unity and focus.

The PLO officially formed in Egypt at a meeting of the Arab League in 1964. The Egyptian president, Gamal Nasser, was a client of Moscow, which supplied Egypt with weapons, trained its military leaders around its Eastern European possessions, and even offered to defend it with nuclear weapons during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

Any would-be nation needs a national anthem and the poet Said Al Muzayin obliged the following year, writing bellicose words pretty indicative of the Palestinian mindset then and now: “Warrior, warrior, warrior,” it starts, before going on about “my determination, my fire and the volcano of my vendetta”. No word here about saving gracious kings. In any case, they were girt by Jews. It continues: “With the resolve of the winds and the fire of the weapons.”

The first leaders of the PLO disappointed Moscow, so they lobbied for their man. After the Arabs’ humiliating defeat in 1967’s Six-Day War, Nasser, who briefly resigned, declared Egypt-born Yasser Arafat to be the leader of the Palestinians. By 1969, Arafat was chairman of the PLO, as well as the KGB’s chief asset in the region. By then Yuri Andropov, who would in 1982 replace Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union, was running the KGB – and Arafat.

Andropov told a senior Romanian colleague, General Ion Pacepa, that: “We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”

The Russians soon started funding and arming the PLO and its terror offshoots with shipments of machine guns, remotely detonated landmines, grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and rifles for long-distance sniper attacks. Some of these were used in the 1970 Black September attacks when the PLO, which had taken up residence in Jordan, sought to take over that country.

They were used in other terror attacks including the hijacking in 1976 of an Air France flight on a stopover in Athens during a Tel Aviv-Paris service. The hijackers directed the plane first to Libya and then on to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, where psychotic dictator Idi Amin, a pro-Palestinian racist, drove to the airport to welcome the terrorists to his country. They demanded Israel free about 40 Palestinian prisoners for the more than 100, mostly Jewish, hostages.

Instead, the Israelis launched their audacious raid on the airport on the night of July 3. They killed the hijackers and left with all but three of the hostages. One Israeli soldier was killed: Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of today’s Israeli Prime Minister.

One hostage, Dora Bloch, 74, had been taken to hospital. An enraged, humiliated Amin ordered that she be murdered. Soldiers killed her. Her body was found three years later in a sugar plantation. Her face had been burned. (It is worth noting that Amin was chairman of the Organisation of African Unity and the following year his country was elevated to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.)

Arafat would remain leader of the PLO until his death in 2004. Indeed, our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese once travelled to Ramallah to meet the man who used to boast that he invented hijacking. Foreign Minister Penny Wong did not go. Very sensible. According to the UN, where Wong likes to have the floor, the Palestinian territories are not safe for women: “Women and girls in the occupied Palestinian territory face discrimination and risk of gender-based violence, including early/forced marriage, intimate partner/family violence, sexual harassment, rape, incest, ­denial of resources, psychological abuse and risk of sexual exploitation and abuse.”

Arafat defiantly stood in the way of peace and refused generous offers for a separate Palestinian state. He never wanted a two-state solution, even though for years he pretended to. He wanted one Palestinian state and no Jews next door. The map of the world on his office wall had Israel marked as Palestine – a common sight.

While playing along with US plans for peace and a two-state solution, Arafat was reported speaking to a group of Arabs in Sweden in 1996: “Within five years we will have six or seven million Arabs in the West Bank … We will replace Israel with a Palestinian Arab state … I have no use for Jews, they are and remain Jews.” About that time he was also reported as stating: “We will not bend or fail until the blood of every last Jew from the youngest child to the oldest elder is spilled to redeem our land!”

Had there been a lever the pulling of which would obliterate Jews from the earth, Arafat would have elbowed his way to it.

You couldn’t negotiate in good faith with Arafat, he had none. Like his understudy and now Palestinian leader, the poisonous, Moscow-educated liar Mahmoud Abbas. His doctoral thesis insisted that the Jews were secretly partners with the Nazis.

Since October 7 last year, various Palestinian leaders have made it clear that not only was that atrocity welcomed and celebrated, but there was more to come and that it would not end until Jews were wiped out in a new Holocaust. The misguided masses at pro-Palestinian marches in Western capitals are supporting that.

The other day, my friend Itamar Marcus explained what was being said to Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza. Marcus founded Palestinian Media Watch, has negotiated with the Palestinians, and advised governments around the world including in the US, UK, ­Europe, Canada and Australia. His news was depressing. The Palestinian people are being shepherded, without noticeable resistance, to disaster by a committed death cult. Hamas is more popular now than ever.

Marcus says that even good people will support terror if they believe “it is the right, moral, ethical thing to do”. He described the videos (taken by the terrorists) of joyous, cackling gunmen shooting people running away, raping girls, beheading others, blowing up youngsters and setting fire to Jews as evidence they had been taught that Jews were less than human, indeed evil beings best eradicated.

He says that Palestinians have been convinced that Jews endanger all humanity, and that has become part of their national identity.

And it starts at the top, with Arafat’s replacement, Abbas. The lies to “his” people are on such a scale, they sound absurd to any normal listener. He told a Fatah conference six weeks before the October 7 attacks that Hitler killed the Jews, not because of their religion, but their “social role, which is connected to usury and money … they caused ruin in his opinion, and therefore he hated them”.

Abbas is telling Arabs that killing Jews is just self-defence.

This wasn’t news to anyone. He had addressed the UN a few months earlier where he explained Britain and the US wanted rid of their Jews and had cooked up a scheme after the war to create a place for them, with the added bonus that it would give the West a toehold in the oil-rich region. The UN delegates sat in silence.

That slogan “from the river to the sea” is not about real estate. For Arafat and Abbas and Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Sinwar it is, and was always, what they see as the noble cause of ridding us of Jews. Hitler failed. They and their successors don’t plan to. From the river to the sea, they want the job done. And they have broad support at home and abroad. Even on Australian city streets. But perhaps that is to be expected while Albanese and Wong vandalise Australia’s reputation for fairness in Middle East affairs. Those puerile calls for a ceasefire were morally neutral at best.

Mahmoud Al-Habbash is Abbas’s adviser on religious and Islamic affairs and said in a recent broadcast that there never had been a Jewish nation – it was invented by Europeans to gather them together.

Al-Habbash called Jews “grazing herds of humanoids … those whom Allah has cursed and with whom he became angry and made of them apes and pigs”. They are also Satan in human form. So to kill one is not to kill a human. Advice the attackers of October 7 took to heart. It was Allah’s will. This view was reinforced at mosques across the Palestinian territory in sermons distributed en masse in the days after the attacks.

On July 9 this year a preacher on official Palestinian Authority television said: “O Allah, power of hand and might, support the jihad fighters in the Gaza Strip … strike the thieving Jews … count them and kill them one by one.”

The morning after the October 7 slaughter, a Fatah member was on television delighted with the carnage that had claimed whole families in Israel, including babies. Abd Al-Rahman Abu Al-Rub said: “We say to our people … a morning of victory, a morning of pride. We ask Allah to send a blessing to our heroic martyrs in the Gaza Strip.”

These are the words of a savage. And they sound familiar. A day later, Sydney’s Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun excitedly addressed a crowd gathered at Lakemba in the city’s west. “I’m smiling,” he said. Indeed he was so beside himself, he said it again: “I’m smiling and I’m happy. I’m elated. It’s a day of courage. It’s a day of pride. It’s a day of victory. This is the day we’ve been waiting for.”

Then, bending history, and falling in line with Arafat and Abbas and their repugnant footsoldiers, he said: “Seventy-five years of occupation … What happened yesterday was the first time our brothers and sisters broke through the largest prison on Earth.”

By claiming 75 years of occupation, Dadoun renders illegitimate the state of Israel from 1948. This is river-to-the-sea talk.

Dadoun was born in Sydney. We cannot cancel his citizenship, even if he is among the most dangerous Australians. But those chanting “Allah” as he spoke may not yet be Australians. Or they may be naturalised Australians. That could be a problem for them and some of the thousands of Australians wearing keffiyehs and demanding the Jews be murderously swept from the Middle East.

Two days after October 7, some of the world’s most significant buildings – the Brandenburg Gate, 10 Downing Street, the EU headquarters, the Eiffel Tower – were ­illuminated in Israel’s colours. At only one was there a riot: Sydney’s Opera House, where police stood mute as thugs burned Israeli flags, lit flares, even throwing them at police, and chanted “F..k the Jews” and “Where’s the Jews”.

None of them was arrested that night. Not one. Jews were warned not to attend. The government and NSW police had abandoned them.

The names of each offender should have been taken and checked against their immigration status. Any of them here on a variety of student, business, family or visitor visas should have been removed from the country. And those who had gained citizenship should have had their migration status reviewed.

It’s pretty simple. The Australian Citizenship Pledge states: “From this time forward, I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.”

Clearly anyone who had taken that pledge and criminally rioted that day lied at the time they uttered the pledge. Anyone who has defaced the offices of our members of parliament, smashed windows and painted crude pro-Palestinian slogans, and who has taken that pledge, lied while doing so. Those are acts against our democracy. Indeed, they are terror attacks, even if governments indolently leave the investigations to suburban police.

Anyone who daubs buildings and signs with Hamas slogans is supporting a terrorist organisation and, if they took the pledge, lied at that time.

The Australian Citizenship Pledge is important and serious. I thought so when I took it. Those words define how we choose to live in this country. If you choose not to live that way then this is not the place for you.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/brutal-home-truths-for-those-marching-in-support-of-palestinians/news-story/5b9ab986de50ae47e19dc86bebf0075f

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My main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Iran couldn't prevent Israeli strike even though they knew it was coming

Strike showed Iranians that they were defenceless

Shortly before 2am on Saturday in Israel, airmen and women wearing bomber jackets bearing the Star of David climbed into the cockpits of about 100 jet fighters, spy planes and refuelling aircraft at an Israeli military base. They were following commands from an underground bunker known as the pit.

Israel’s wartime leaders, who were gathered in the bowels of the military headquarters in Tel Aviv, had just given the green light for the largest attack against Iran in Israel’s history — and its most politically perilous. They called the operation “Days of Repentance”. The assault was calibrated to punish Iran for an attack on Israel but aimed to avoid setting off a full-scale war between the two foes involving American forces and other countries in the region. The attack steered clear of the oil and nuclear facilities that Iran had warned would prompt a retaliation, and appeared to heed the caution urged by US officials.

The attack, however, marked a dangerous new phase of confrontation between Israel and Iran, which began striking each other directly earlier this year. It left Iran even more exposed to further air attacks, with Israel destroying several of the country’s Russian-made S-300 batteries, according to an Israeli official.

“The message is that we don’t want an escalation but if Iran decides to escalate and attack Israel again, this means that we have increased our range of freedom of movement in the Iranian skies,” an Israeli official said.

For weeks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had signalled that Israel would hit back over Iran’s ballistic-missile assault on Israeli territory on October 1. Pulling it off required weeks of planning and delicate diplomacy.

Iran “knew that Israel was coming, and still they couldn’t prevent anything,” said Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general.

The US — sensing an opening after Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar — has been pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel and other Middle East capitals this week in an effort to reach a deal that has eluded negotiators for months. The calibrated nature of the attack appeared to leave room for those talks to continue, with negotiators set to meet in the Qatari capital Doha on Sunday.

Videos carried by Iranian media on Saturday (October 26) showed an air defense system continuously firing at apparently incoming projectiles over central Tehran, as Israel's military said it launched three waves of strikes on military sites in Iran.
But even as Israel worked diplomatic channels that could end the war in Gaza and cool tensions with Tehran, Israeli officials were completing details of the retaliatory attack.

On Friday evening, as the sun set marking the start of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, Israel’s cabinet in a phone conversation led by Netanyahu agreed to move ahead with an attack that night, according to an Israeli official.

Hours before the attack began, Israel alerted the U.S. and several Arab-world and European capitals about the nature and scope of the attack, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials in some of those countries then alerted Iran.

Israel’s prime minister’s office later said the idea that it informed Iran about the nature or timing of the attack was “false and absurd.” When they finally began, the Israeli strikes unfurled in waves. The attack involved Israel’s most-advanced aerial weapon, F-35 jet fighters, adept at evading radar, people familiar with the mission said.

As the jet fighters were airborne, Israeli officials, conscious that their U.S. counterparts were frustrated that Israel hadn’t forewarned last month that it would kill Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, also made a point of actively briefing their U.S. counterparts about their attack.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called his U.S. counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who assured him of America’s readiness to defend Israel against backlash from Iran and aligned militant groups.

The first crop of jet fighters destroyed air-defence batteries in Syria and Iraq, clearing the flight path for the second and third sorties to funnel through to Iran.

Their exact route, which hasn’t been shared by Israel, appeared to dodge airspace in Jordan after the Arab nation said it wouldn’t be part of an attack on Iran. Most of the attacks were launched from outside Iranian airspace, said Amir Aviv, a former senior Israeli military official who is often briefed by the defence establishment. Iran said Israeli planes attacked from within Iraqi airspace, around 70 miles from its border.

At around 3.30am in Israel, the country’s military launched the second of at least three waves of attacks, according to people familiar with the matter.

Israel’s strikes targeted Iranian facilities involved in the production of missiles like the cruise and ballistic missiles that targeted Israel twice this year.

One of Israel’s hits was at the sprawling Parchin military site, where Iran once worked on nuclear weapons capabilities, according to the U.N. atomic agency. Four buildings were hit there, including three solid-propellant facilities for missiles, said Fabian Hinz, research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies focused on Iran’s missile program.

Just before sunrise, Israel’s military said its attack and retaliation were complete. The planes returned at the end of the four-hour assault with no losses.

Soon after, Iranian officials began privately telling Arab nations that the attack hit sites with great accuracy. In public, the regime said it led to “limited damage” and that Iran reserved the right to carry out a response at a time of its choosing. Four Iranian soldiers were killed in the attacks, Iran said.

Israeli officials said they hope that the attack would end a tit-for-tat exchange of fire with Iran and Israel’s military could now focus on its war goals fighting Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iranian allies.

Orion, the retired brigadier general, said the attack was calibrated but doesn’t mean the end of tensions with Iran. “It allows both sides to finish for now until the U.S. elections, and then see where it goes,” he added.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/how-israel-pulled-off-its-largest-ever-strike-on-iran/news-story/c1e625a38b587db9ff415ccb70dbcf08

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Why does the ‘Right Side of History’ always get it so wrong?

Comment from Nicholas Jensen in Australia

Several months ago, after a terse exchange of views at a local pub, I was shocked to learn I’d landed on the Wrong Side of History. “Christ,” I thought. “Not again.” Quite how I ended up there on this occasion – and I’ll come to this soon – remains something of a mystery, though it’s clear polite society won’t be welcoming me back anytime soon.

For those unfamiliar with the expression, the essential thing to know about the Right Side of History is that it is the good side of history, the side of the gods. As for everyone else – you know who you are, you know what you’ve done. You’re not just a lost cause but you’re a lousy person, hopelessly out of step with the rest of humanity.

The other thing to know about the Right Side of History is you can’t dodge it. Occasionally, this can be awkward because some of its most ardent advocates can be very nice, well-meaning people – like teal voters without a cause, though much more authoritarian by nature.

The heavy-duty warriors tend to be familiar characters, easy to spot. In politics, the Obamas and Clintons stand unique among the Right Side of History warriors. “My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history,” was a stock-standard Barack Obama line wheeled out on more than a dozen occasions in his big presidential speeches.

Over on planet celebrity, Taylor Swift recently confessed that she “needed to be on the right side of history” when it came to engaging in politics, while our very own Senator Fatima Payman produced a classic of the genre when she wrote earlier this year of the Middle East: “Let historians write of us that we were on the right side of history, that we boldly reinforced international law, and that we were a shining beacon and voice for freedom.”

It’s worth remembering that we survived a near-lethal overdose of the Right Side of History not so long ago, when public debate of the voice descended into an absurd Manichean struggle between saints and sinners, heroes and villains. As it happens, that little pub skirmish I mentioned earlier occurred when I was asked by a group of mates how I’d voted at the referendum. When the reply came “No”, off to Siberia I trod. (Yes, millennial No voters do exist, in case you’re wondering.)

One obvious trap with this kind of thinking is the belief that the Right Side of History is unique to the puritans of our own age. Every depraved despot and potentate worth their salt, at one time or other, has claimed some guiding force, some special insight into an imagined future that seeks to vindicate their odious deeds. In that sense, the Right Side of History is the perfect weapon, perhaps the most dangerous of all.

Still, there’s no getting around one big problem: history doesn’t work this way and, what’s more, it never has. The Right Side of History presupposes a direction, a teleology, in which history moves inexorably towards an endpoint, a synthesis, from which it can reset and go again. Next to Hegel, Marx and the Whig conception of history, modernity is strewn with the corpses of a thousand dead-end theories on the causes of development and progress. In the end, chance, randomness and indeterminacy seem the more likely candidates.

In these febrile times, where the weaponisation of the past and the debasement of language seems virtually universal, it’s curious to observe just how casually the Right Side of History has morphed into a progressive article of faith, a kind of gibbering battle cry for the self-righteous and the condescending. Still, its expression contains a stark warning, worthy of our attention – namely, that it is better to stick to the sceptical side of history than cling to the wisdom of false prophets.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/why-the-right-side-of-history-always-gets-it-so-wrong/news-story/a663b99bd836e182ba91241bec865906

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My main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Political correctness

I have just changed the template for my "Skeptical Notes" blog.  It should now be clearer and easier to read. It can be found here:

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com/

It replaces my deleted "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH" blog

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Nearly everything you assume about colonialism and slavery is wrong

Nigel Biggar’s book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning(2021) is a much needed corrective to the lies and misinformation being propagated in schools all over the world. For instance, after nearly 150 years of transporting slaves across the Atlantic Ocean, the British abolished the slave trade and spent the subsequent 150 years deploying the Royal Navy to stop the slave trade across the world. Not only was this the first time a major superpower abolished the ancient practice of slavery, but it was also the first instance of an empire suppressing it beyond its borders.

Up to 36 ships from the Royal Navy, over 13 per cent of the Empire’s total manpower, were stationed off the Coast of Africa, policing the Atlantic Ocean until the late 1800s. Britain was able to pressure countries like Brazil into passing legislation which outlawed the slave trade. Before his death in 1865, the twice-Prime Minister Lord Palmerston wrote that ‘the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade’. Ultimately, 2,000 British Sailors gave their life to stop the international slave trade.

But what most people have never been taught though, is that the anti-slavery movement actually began much earlier than 1833. In fact, in 1791, about 30 per cent of the adult male population of Britain signed anti-slavery petitions. Few people realise today that the largest department of the British Empire’s Foreign Office for two decades was the Slave Trade Department, which was set up to suppress slavery worldwide.

It is also a little-known fact today, that according to the historian David Eltis, it cost the British Empire more money to end the slave trade than it received in profits from it. It cost taxpayers nearly 2 billion pounds every year for half a century. For context, the British today spends 2 per cent of their GDP on national defence. In comparison, the British Empire nearly 2 per cent of its GDP every year for 50 years to end the slave trade. In fact, the British taxpayer only finished paying off the debt of ending slavery in 2015.

However, despite these astonishing facts about the British Empire, recent You Gov polling found that 60 per cent of Britons who were proud of the British Empire in 2014, had drastically halved to almost 30 per cent by 2020. Other polling has also shown that only one in five young people view Winston Churchill favourably.

Today, colonialism is routinely called essentially evil, genocidal, greedy, and racist. These attitudes have generated a wave of riots tearing down statues and rejecting anything that has been a product of European colonialism.

So how did attitudes about the British Empire change so quickly? Is the legacy of the British Empire good or bad? Was it built on slavery or cooperation? Did it expand through violence or trade? And was the British Empire essentially racist?

These are the questions at the heart of Cambridge academic Nigel Biggar’s new book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, and what follows is some his most important ideas which very people have been taught today.

Chapter 1: The Origins of the British Empire

Before asking whether the British Empire was evil, we first need to consider how a small European island at its peak controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s land mass.

So why did England choose to expand? Well, like many complex ideas, there was no single motivation that drove the British Empire. For example, the British Empire began expanding when the Kingdom of Wessex sought to secure its borders in response to Danish and Welsh invasions. Even the conquest of the North America was driven by the threat of Catholic Spain, which was committed to overthrowing protestant Europe.

Additionally, British privateers established colonial ports at key strategic locations in Africa and America in response to Spanish competition. For many young British officers of the East Indian trading company, they were driven by the intention to trade and the excitement of adventure, like John Malcolm, who joined the EIC because his father had gone bankrupt. Malcolm ended up learning and documenting the Persian language and history, eventually became the governor of Bombay. The governor, like many others in the British Empire, was motivated to escape poverty and earn a living.

In fact, British colonialism began and was supported by mutual cooperation with the local population. For example, the EIC secured trading ports in India, and after hiring and training Indian troops, developed small colonies. Many Indian rulers actually paid the British military to protect their kingdoms against other native rulers, who began giving land to the British as payment. As Tirthankar Roy, one of the leading Indian historians of the 21st Century states:

Turning the emergence of the empire into a battle between good and evil creates melodrama; it invites the reader to take sides in a fake holy war. But if good soap opera, it is bad history. The empire was not an invasion. Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, wanted the British to secure power. They preferred British rule over indigenous alternatives and helped the Company form a state. The empire emerged mainly from alliances. It emerged from lands ‘ceded’ to the Company by Indian friends, rather than lands it ‘conquered’. The Company came to rule India because many Indians wanted it to.

Interestingly, it was the British who were keener in documenting the culture and languages of Persian, Hindu, and Bengali people, than the locals. For example, the EIC officer Warren Hastings pioneered the revival of Indian Sanskrit.

Money and knowledge were not the only motivation for colonies, it was also agreed by officers like John Malcolm and James Abbott, that to leave India would be dangerous because it would cause a power struggle between warring states. So, if the British Empire expanded through cooperation with local Indian rulers, what about Africa? Again, the British were motivated not just by one goal, but many.

First, Britain wanted to stop the spread of Militant Islam to protect trade with Uganda and Nyasaland.

Second, Britain wanted to end inter-tribal warfare between kingdoms like the Zulu and Ndebele, which was a cause of human misery, slave trafficking, and trade disruptions.

Third, as Lord Salisbury argued in the 1890 Anglo-German Agreement Bill, acquisition of land would stop the escalation of European nations going to war over local conflicts.

Fourth, in places like Egypt, Britain were duty bound to protect their investments in the Egyptian government which was on the verge of bankruptcy. London’s aims in Cairo were not to directly govern, but to enact fiscal reform to the benefit of both countries which was the view of the British comptroller general in Egypt, Lord Cromer. In fact, the colonial office did not want to directly govern Egypt because of the financial responsibility and burden of administration, the exact reason it declined the offer of exclusive control over Gladstone by the Ottoman Sultan.

Fifth, as early as Sir Thomas Munro, the governor of Madras from 1819-27, Britain saw its role in many of its colonies as the precursor to self-government. This reality was made pertinent after the American war of Independence, which saw Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa granted the status of self-governing dominions.

As Biggar points out, there was no single ‘set of motives that drove the British Empire’. It was a collection of reasons which differed between ‘trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official, and statesmen’. These ranged from:

‘The aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government.’

But what about slavery? Wasn’t the British motivated by the benefits of buying, working, and selling slaves?

Chapter 2: The British Empire and Slavery

Before we unpack colonial slavery, we first have to understand its history. Slavery was not unique to the British Empire; rather it is both ancient and universal.

In Asia, for instance, slavery could be found as early as 7th Century AD in China. In North and South America, the Comanche, Aztecs, and Incas all ‘ran a slave economy from the 18th Century. Since Muhammad, the Islamic world has utilised slavery, even receiving white European slaves from Viking traders in the 8th and 9th Centuries.

It is a little-known fact today, but the word slave actually comes from the European group of people ‘Slav’. One historian estimates over 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved in the North African trade before the end of the 18th Century. By comparison, it is estimated that while Europeans transported 11 million slaves from Africa, another 17 million were shipped by the Islamic slave trade. Similarly, African tribes have been enslaving each other for centuries. Many of these slaves was used as human sacrifices. Biggar quotes one report from 1797 which recorded between 1400-1500 people being sacrificed at a royal funeral in Asante Africa.

The British were not even the first or largest slave trader in Africa. The Portuguese Empire was the first European nation to seek slaves from West Africa from 1440. By 1866, the Portuguese had almost shipped 5.9 million slaves, which is 46.7 per cent of the total African slave trade by Europeans, compared to the 26.1 per cent of the British.

So why does the criticism for slavery often rest on Britain, if it was part such an ancient and universal practice? One of the critics to popularise British Slavery in particular was the historian Eric Williams, in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery (1944), where he argued slavery made ‘an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development’.

Unfortunately for Williams, his thesis has since been widely discredited by academics familiar with British Economic history. In the 1960s, Roger Anstey calculated the profits of slavery to be far below the revenue needed to finance the Industrial Revolution. This view was confirmed by David Robertson Richardson who estimated the total profits of the slave trade to be around 1 per cent of Britain’s total domestic investment around 1790. More recently, David Brion Davis, an expert in 20th Century slavery pronounced the death of William’s thesis, declaring that it ‘has now been wholly discredited by other scholars’.

Chapter 3: An Empire of Stolen Land?

What about countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where native tribes did not always negotiate formal treaties with the British government?

In 1768, Captain Cook was instructed that he was to ‘endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with [the native peoples]’ and ‘with [their] consent to take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain’.

So why didn’t the British build an alliance like it did with local groups in India?

First, most of the local tribal groups had shifting borders due to conflict and migration. The Canadian historian Tom Flanagan argues, it is hard to do justice:

‘…to the war of extermination waged by the Iroquois against the Huron, or to the ferocious struggles between the Cree and the Blackfoot over access to the buffalo herds. The historical record clearly shows that, while aboriginal peoples exercised a kind of collective control over territories, the boundaries were neither long-lasting nor well defined and communities must have been repeatedly formed, dissolved, and reconstituted with different identities.’

In America, the Comanches launched ‘an explosive expansion’, which obliterated ‘the Apache civilisation from the Great Plains’ and carved out ‘a vast territory’. From 1750 to 1850 their empire dominated the region, building ‘the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest’.

In Australia, the historian Geoffrey Blainey points out the rate of violent deaths in some areas between Aboriginal tribal groups was greater than the rate of violent deaths in almost every European country during the second world war. There are several documented accounts of early Aboriginal tribes wiping out other tribes in what is now known as northern Victoria.

In New Zealand, Polynesian explorers began what has been called ‘the Maori colonial era’, which by the 15th Century gave rise to inter-tribal warfare, enslavement, generational vendettas, and sometimes cannibalism. As Biggar points out, ‘The bloodshed ended thanks in part to the influence of Christianity, which forbade cannibalism and slavery, and whose influence was spread by Maori evangelists, many of them former slaves.’ According to a leading New Zealand historian:

‘By 1850 the balance sheet of benefits and disadvantages of British administration might well have appeared favourable to many Maori. There appeared to be a place for Maori people in a variety of colonial activities. They profited from the increased pace of development as settlement expanded. Through government employment on road and other public works, as well as through private contracts, Maori earned considerable amounts in cash. The new authority in the land also gradually overcame some of the old tribal antagonisms and made it possible for tribes to mix and communicate more freely. Under [Governor George] Grey’s administration, some of the long-promised welfare benefits were provided: hospitals were opened and the Education Ordinance provided for Maori education.’

Nevertheless, there were many instances of hostile conflict between natives and settlers, which were often one-sided, brutal and devastating for the local populations. Unfortunately, most of it happened outside of government control, which could not stop the individual expansion of enterprise. As Biggar writes:

‘Sometimes native peoples lost territory to colonists because the latter mistook land that was unoccupied or uncultivated for land that was unowned. Sometimes the natives lost it because they were conquered by ungoverned settlers in war that easily flared up on lawless frontiers, where fear was abundant and trust rare. However, where British imperial authorities succeeded in asserting their ‘sovereignty’ over territory, native title to land was recognised and its transfer to settlers regulated – in principle and sometimes in practice – for the sake of justice and of peace.’

Chapter 4: Conclusion

So why are these reasonable and balanced accounts of the British Empire covered up and rarely discussed? As Biggar points out, ‘The controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.’

Some of the most important debates in Australia today, in changing the Constitution to have an enshrined Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal people, and the international push for reparations, are justified by a one-sided view of colonial history.

The anger towards the British Empire is so strong that Biggar’s book was pulled by Bloomsbury publishing right before its release because ‘public feeling’ was ‘not currently favourable’. The book had already gone through rigorous peer review from some of the world’s most prominent academics on the subject. Biggar’s book was not cancelled by its publishers for a lack of research, but rather a fear of backlash from anti-colonial activists.

Today, academic papers like From Colonisation to the Holocaust, The Erotics of Resistance, and Colonisations impact on climate change and the queer community pass as serious research. The truth is, all of the most prosperous nations in the world are heirs of the British Empire, its institutions, laws, customs, and language.

If anyone wants to understand where we are today, and where are going, we must have a better and more balanced understanding of our history, which includes the good, the bad, and everything in between.

Without a proper appreciation for history, we may never improve on the prosperity and peace laid down by the foundations of the British Empire.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/nearly-everything-you-assume-about-colonialism-and-slavery-is-wrong/

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Biden lets his inner Fascist show

President Joe Biden sparked fury Tuesday night by suggesting Donald Trump should be in jail just 14 days out from the presidential election.

'We gotta lock him up', the 81-year-old president said at event in New Hampshire.

Biden appeared to realize what he said, and tried to correct himself by saying 'we need to politically lock him up. Lock him out. That's what we have to do.'

It comes after Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris takes care to try to shut down 'lock him up' chants that have popped up at her campaign rallies.

She routinely says to leave the matter up to the courts.

The chants clash with her campaign based in part on preserving democracy and long and order from what she calls the Trump threat – and is similar to the 'lock her up' chants at Trump's 2016 rallies that Democrats continue to call out.

Trump has long centered his own campaign around contesting the criminal cases against him, and accuses rivals of practicing 'lawfare' against him.

He faces sentencing in September after his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, which could technically land him in jail, although many experts say the first-time white collar offender is likely to avoid doing jail time.

His son, Donald Trump Jr., teed off on Biden's comments.

'They're not even hiding it. The lawfare against my dad was always about election interference!' he posted on X.

Trump's own campaign rhetoric has included multiple threats to go after people he calls the 'enemy from within,' including Senate candidate Adam Schiff.

He experienced a poll and campaign donation bump during his New York hush money trial, and has railed against 'deranged' special counsel Jack Smith bringing charges against him related to his January 6 election overturn effort.

Biden, who only occasionally jumps on the campaign trail after committing a string of gaffes, made the comment after saying Trump was talking about abolishing the Education Department.

'This is a guy who also wants to replace every civil servant. Every single one. Things he has a right under the Supreme Court ruling on immunity to be able to if need be ... to actually eliminate, physically eliminate, shoot, kill someone he believes to be a threat to him. I know this sounds bizarre. [If]I said this five years ago you'd lock me up - you gotta lock him up,' he said.

'Politically lock him up,' he added.

Although Trump has repeatedly railed against his political opponents and threatened to use the machinery to government to go after them, he hasn't spoken about being able to kill people who are a threat to him.

He continues to try to turn the Democrats' own rhetoric against them.

'If we lose this election, we may not have a country anymore,' he said at his Doral golf club on Monday. 'They say we may never have an election again in this country. This is where we’re going,' he said.

Democrats have raised increasing concern about whether Trump will once again declare victory and refuse to accept the results of the election, as he did in 2020.

He was coy once again when asked at a suburban area McDonald's drive-thru Saturday whether he would accept the election results no matter the outcome.

'Yeah, sure, if it’s a fair election,' Trump said. 'I would always accept it. It's got to be a fair election,' he said.

He continue to call for a win that is 'too big to rid' – implying his rivals will cheat without offering evidence.

'We gotta lock Joe up,' a former Biden aide quipped to Axios, noting that the statement was politically unhelpful.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called on the Harris campaign to condemn Biden's 'disgraceful' remark.

'Joe Biden just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square. The Harris-Biden Admin is the real threat to democracy,' she said.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13989643/Joe-biden-kamala-harris-donald-trump-lock-up.html

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Tulsi Gabbard announces she is joining the Republican Party and stuns Trump

Former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced she is joining the Republican party Tuesday night.

Taking the stage before thousands in Greensboro, North Carolina, Gabbard cemented her conversion from Democrat to Republican.

'It is because of my love for our country and specifically because of the leadership that President Trump has brought to transform the Republican Party that I'm proud to stand here with you today and announce that I'm joining the Republican Party,' she proudly declared.

She continued: 'I'm joining the party of the people, the party of equality, the party that was founded to fight against and end slavery in this country.'

Gabbard said that the GOP and Trump were 'the party of common sense and the party that is led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for peace.'

The two then embraced on stage in front of a screaming audience.
Former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced she is joining the Republican party Tuesday night. The gesture surprised Trump who embraced her on stage shortly after she made the announcement

In 2022, she announced she was leaving the Democratic party to become an Independent.

She then announced in August that she was endorsing former President Donald Trump and promised to do everything she could to secure his election.

Regaining control of the mic after Gabbard's announcement, Trump said he was stunned by the announcement, which he had not known was coming.

'Thank you very much, Tulsi, that's great wow,' Trump said seemingly stunned.

'That was a surprise,' he continued, calling the gesture a 'great honor' and a 'beautiful speech.

The former president called her a 'woman that everybody loves' who has 'so much common sense'.

'Boy you are popular' he told her in front of the crowd as she brought her on stage.

Gabbard said the Democratic Party is now 'completely unrecognizable'. She was a member for more than 20 years.

She ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 and ended up endorsing Joe Biden when she dropped out.

The former congresswoman called Kamala Harris 'anti-freedom' and 'pro-censorship' and slammed her recent foreign policy moves.

'She is anti-freedom, she is pro-censorship, she is pro-open borders, and she is pro-war,' Gabbard said of Harris.

'Without even pretending to care about peace, as President Trump talked about, she has shamelessly embraced the endorsement and support of warmongers like Dick Cheney, and Liz Cheney,' she added.

Gabbard, a National Guard veteran, ran for president in 2019. She clashed memorably with Harris as they fought for the Democratic nomination, eventually won by Joe Biden.

She campaigned on a platform that decried U.S. involvement in the Middle East, saying it made the nation less safe, and directed blame at both Republicans and Democrats.

In 2019, she was the only lawmaker to vote 'present' during the highly partisan first impeachment of Trump.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13990183/tulsi-gabbard-donald-trump-north-carolina-rally.html

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In markets, bets are on a Trump victory

With less than two weeks to the US election, financial markets are flagging a victory for Donald Trump.

From betting markets to Trump Media shares and cryptocurrencies, the “Trump trades” have kicked up a gear.

That’s despite Vice President Kamala Harris having a narrow lead over Republican nominee Trump in national polling, although reports of early voting in swing states expected to decide the presidency suggest Trump and his fellow Republicans are faring better than at the same stage of previous elections.

In the betting markets, PredictIt has Trump clearly leading Harris. His price (which equates to the odds of winning the presidency) is US58¢ against her US45¢. Polymarket shows an even bigger margin, with Trump’s odds of winning 63.7 per cent and Harris’ 36.4 per cent, although four big wagers totalling $US30 million ($45 million) might have something to do with that.

Trump’s agenda is more radical than Harris’ and would have a bigger impact on financial markets, making his prospects easier to track from an investor point of view.

His trade policies – baseline tariffs of up to 20 per cent on all imports, a 60 per cent tariff on imports from China and threats of a tariff of up to 200 per cent on imports of cars from Mexico – would reverberate through global markets and the world economy.

Most of the bets being made by investors seem to be reasonably conservative. Broadly, however, they do predict a Trump win.

Trump would maintain his 2017 tax cuts, set to expire next year. They favoured companies and wealthy households, and Trump has indicated he wants to reduce their tax rates even further.

He has promised to cut regulation, free up the energy sector, slash government spending and detain and deport millions of illegal immigrants. He’s also said he wants influence over the Federal Reserve Board’s decision-making, or at least some input.

Beneficiaries from his policies would, at face value, include executives and shareholders across corporate America, the energy sector, pharmaceutical companies, big tech, private prison operators (someone has to oversee the detention of the immigrants), and cryptocurrencies, where the Trump family recently launched a venture.

The prospects of a Trump win, at the macro level, would most likely show up in currency, bond and share markets. His policies are likely to generate a big increase in government debt and a spike in US inflation that would drive up longer-term interest rates and the US dollar, while the tax cuts would be enthusiastically greeted by sharemarket investors.

The US dollar has strengthened more than 3.5 per cent this month against America’s major trading partners’ currencies. The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds has increased from 3.7 per cent to 4.2 per cent, the term premium (the extra yield required to compensate for holding longer duration bonds) has blown out significantly, and the US sharemarket has risen 2.5 per cent over the same period.

The sharemarket’s response is interesting. Trump’s tax cuts and his deregulatory agenda would be positive for companies and their investors. But most economists agree that his trade and immigration policies would be inflationary and hit consumers hard, particularly low-income households, and have a materially adverse impact on the US economy.

Yet maybe those are viewed as potential longer-term threats when set against the near-term benefits of his tax cuts.

At a more granular level, energy stocks are up almost 3 per cent so far this month, while shares in the two biggest private prison operators – Geo Group and CoreCivic – are up 21 per cent and 11.2 per cent, respectively.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/in-markets-bets-are-on-a-trump-victory-20241023-p5kkj3.html

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Trump goes all in on his tariffs

Trump is undoubtedly well outside the simple thinking of economic orthodoxy. Most economists think his policies would drive Americans into poverty. Economic development is however complex and they fail to note that, far from Trump being economically illiterate, Trump's degree is in fact in economics and comes from a prestige economics school. They particularly seem to overlook the economic growth that would result from a largely uniform 10% tariff.

They also overlook that history is on his side. There are at least two clear examples of high tariffs being economically beneficial. The first is that America prospered mightily in the 19th century behind a high tariff wall. That is normally attributed to an "infant industry" effect and is therefore not now relevant but it IS relevant. Major American industries have now laggged so far behind Asian industries that they could be said to have reverted to infant status

The second example isn't well known but Australia under R.G. Menzies in the '60s was also very comfortable behind a high tariff wall. For details of that, see:

http://jonjayray.com/trumpism.html

So Trump seems likely to get good economic results next time around too

It seems like every time Donald Trump makes a public appearance, he promises yet another tax cut. Now he’s doing something similar with his cherished tariffs.

Interviewed by Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago this week, Trump not only defended his plan to impose a 10 per cent baseline tariff on all imports to the US and a punitive 60 per cent tariff on imports from China, but doubled down.

Arguing that tariffs would not only raise hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit-reducing revenue from the exporting countries, but also provide an incentive to foreign companies to shift their plants to the US, he claimed that the higher the tariff, the more likely it was that companies would build their factories in the US to avoid it.

“In fact, I’ll tell you, there’s another theory, [it] is that the tariff, you make it so high, so horrible, so obnoxious that they’ll come right away,” he said.

“There’s two ways of looking at a tariff. You can do it as a money-making instrument, or you can do it as something to get the companies. Now, if you want the companies to come in, the tariff has to be a lot higher than 10 per cent, because 10 per cent is not enough. They’re not going to do it for 10 per cent.

“But you make a 50 per cent tariff, they’re going to come in.”

“All you have to do is build your plant in the United States, and you don’t have any tariffs,” he said, while threatening to apply high tariffs to imports of European cars, including Mercedes-Benz, to force them to build cars in the US.

He also threatened tariff rates of “100, 200, 2000 per cent” on cars from Mexico, which has a free trade agreement with the US and therefore could provide a back door to the US market.

“They’re not going to sell one car into the United States,” he said.

Trump rejects the consensus view of economists – and the actual experience of his 2018 tariffs on imports from China – that it will be US companies and consumers that pay the price, making them a form of consumption tax.

“We got hundreds of billions of dollars from China alone, and I haven’t even started yet,” he said.

He also thinks his tariffs will raise trillions of dollars to pay for his proposed tax cuts for companies and wealthy households, along with the abolition of taxes on tips, overtime, social security benefits, interest on car loans and credits for state taxes, despite estimates from credible authorities like the Peterson Institute for International Economics that the tariffs would raise only about $US200 billion ($300 billion) a year. The US government’s revenue base is close to $US5 trillion a year.

Most experts in trade policies believe Trump’s tariffs would damage the US economy and its relationships with the rest of the world, including America’s allies.

They also expect that, should Trump do what he has threatened, its trading partners will retaliate with tariffs of their own. The European Union has already drawn up a list of US goods to target.

Because he doesn’t understand how tariffs work, Trump thinks they are marvellous, a type of magic pudding that he can use to finance his ever-expanding list of tax cuts.

“The most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff’, and it’s my favourite word,” he said. “It needs a public relations firm to help it but, to me, it’s the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently estimated that the Trump policy platform would add $US7.5 trillion to US deficits and debt over a decade, and potentially as much as $US15 trillion, but Trump is adamant that his mix of tariffs and tax cuts will generate growth and reduce the deficit.

“I was always very good at mathematics,” he said.

Most of the economic think tanks that have analysed Trump’s tax, trade and immigration policies have concluded they will shrink the US economy, potentially substantially, reduce employment, ignite a new wave of inflation and result in increased deficits and debt.

During his last term as president, Trump claimed his tax cuts and deregulation would generate economic growth of as much as 6 per cent a year. It peaked at only half that level and his policies, even if the impact of spending in response to the pandemic is excluded, resulted in a massive increase in government debt.

For Trump, however, facts and expert knowledge don’t matter. His gut instincts, genius and business experience give him superior insights.

If Trump does regain the presidency and can implement his policies, they will damage the US economy. The regressive nature of his tax and trade policies and the plan to detain and deport illegal immigrants means they will probably damage US society, too.

And the damage wouldn’t be confined to the US. Indeed, even though the policies would do material long-term harm to the US economy and households, it is likely his trade policies would be even worse for US trade partners’ economies and consumers, particularly (but not exclusively) China and the EU.

Last time he was in office, Trump threatened to sack Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell for keeping US interest rates too high for too long (although it is doubtful he had that authority).

This time, he says he just wants to be able to have the ability to influence, rather than direct, monetary policy, although some of his former White House staff have been looking at options for more direct influence over the Fed.

“As a very good businessman and somebody that uses a lot of, uh, sense [...] I think I have the right to say, you know, I think I’m better than [Powell] would be. I think I’m better than most people would be in that position. I think I have the right to say ‘I think you should go up or down a little bit’,” Trump said.

“I don’t think I should be allowed to order it, but I think I have the right to put in comments as to whether or not interest rates should go up or down.”

It’s not surprising Trump thinks he could do a better job than Powell, given his apparently deep insight into the role and its demands.

“It’s the greatest job in government. You show up to the office once a month, and you say ‘let’s flip a coin’ and everybody talks about you like you’re a god,” he said.

That’s not a perspective on central banking that central bankers or monetary economists anywhere would share as they try to make sense of reams of economic and financial data to protect growth and the stability of their financial systems.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/i-was-always-very-good-at-mathematics-trump-goes-all-in-on-his-tariffs-20241017-p5kj0y.html

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The Real-World Consequences of Soft-on-Crime Prosecutors, Brought to You by George Soros

A first-of-its-kind documentary for The Heritage Foundation is the culmination of years of work, scholarship, live events, and debates, highlighting the radical nature of the George Soros-inspired rogue prosecutors movement—and the dire consequences to the safety and security of the residents and businesses in the communities overseen by so-called progressive prosecutors.

Told through the eyes of real prosecutors, real victims, and the radicals themselves who support this pro-criminal, anti-victim movement, “Rogue Prosecutors: The Full Story” paints a vivid portrait of how and why crime has risen in cities presided over by rogue prosecutors—and what you can do about it.

We coined the term “rogue prosecutors” in 2020 when we first exposed this toxic and dangerous social experiment. We started with a Daily Signal blog series on individual rogue prosecutors, among them George Gascon in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago and others.

We published research papers on how they sabotage the rule of law, implement policies that lead to rising crime rates, and ignore victims. We exposed the fact that there is a blue city murder problem. We published our book, “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities,” and created an audio version of it on Audible.

We debunked the notion that the United States incarcerates “too many” people in our paper “The Myth of Mass Incarceration” by pointing out that most criminals, especially violent criminals, never get caught, much less spend any time in jail or prison.

Over the years, we hosted numerous events, including an event featuring U.S. attorneys who served in cities with rogue prosecutors; an event in Los Angeles featuring women whose children were slain and how Los Angeles D.A. Gascon’s policies helped the criminals and not them; an event at the University of California at Berkeley Law School with former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, where we debated and exposed radicals who advocated for abolishing all prisons and defunding the police; and created a video series in San Francisco and Oakland, California, called “Societal Rot,” where we showed the consequences of rampant drug use and the soft-on-crime policies of Boudin—who was voted out of office because of it—and Oakland District Attorney Pamela Price.

We produced a mini-movie called “An Avoidable Tragedy,” featuring the murder of Wicomico County Deputy Sheriff Glenn Hilliard by a career criminal who then-Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby refused to hold accountable for his repeated parole violations after his armed robbery conviction.

The new documentary stitches together the full story of the rogue prosecutor movement and features crime policy experts Heather MacDonald and Rafael Mangual, elected district attorneys, and victims of crime.

There are approximately 2,300 elected district attorneys across this great country. Who your district attorney is directly affects public safety, which is the bedrock of a civil society.

We hope this documentary opens the public’s eyes to what’s at stake and the real-life consequences of the rogue prosecutor movement.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/21/documentary-exposes-real-life-consequences-rogue-prosecutors/

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

All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Trump hatred divorced from reality

Lily Steiner

Mea culpa. I used to be one of Oprah’s biggest fans – recorded and watched every single show, bought her 25th Anniversary CD as soon as I could get my hands on it… The woman was my hero.

She was smart, likeable, honest, and open. You felt that she understood you, without ever having met her. Oprah imparted so much common sense and even opened a school for girls in Africa to make sure they received a full education. How could audiences not feel good about her? She was a regular person who had grown up with a challenging childhood and realised her dreams.

As a fan, I could forgive her idolisation of Michelle and Barack Obama. I understood her excitement for the Obama presidency, being a black woman. But her backing of the Democratic Party at their 2024 convention and filling of the audience with celebrities to celebrate Kamala Harris, is where I had to draw the line.

Her speech at the convention shocked me. She started by accusing Trump of wanting to divide and create an ‘us’ against ‘them’ society.

‘There are people who want you to see our country as a nation of us against them. People who want to scare you, who want to rule you. People who’d have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe. That there’s a right way to worship and a wrong way to love. People who seek first to divide and then to conquer. But here’s the thing: when we stand together, it is impossible to conquer us.’

She then continues, suggesting Trump is the one wanting to scare Americans. This claim is made after the constant rhetoric of the Democrats about the death of Democracy if Trump is elected for a second time. America should remember that the Democrats are the ones who flooded the country with millions of illegal migrants from all over the world. It was the Democrats who ignored violent rioters from Black Lives Matter and Antifa, even as buildings were being burnt down.

How on earth could an intelligent woman who lived through Trump’s first term accuse Trump of being a fear-monger and who wanted to ban books…? This was my question upon hearing the speech. Is she unaware of the amazing assistance Trump gave to the black community by increasing funding to black schools and universities along with creating funding for black businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship? I wonder if she has heard the testimonies of regular black communities who are standing strong behind Trump…

Oprah, who has interviewed Trump many times and known him for many years, has previously referred to him as a bully. One may make that accusation of the Democrats after they attempted to impeach Trump not once but twice over nonsense accusations. Is Trump the bully in this scenario? As a long-time fan, I am left to wonder if is the same woman who had her own television show for over 25 years that I thought was an independent thinker. Where is that Oprah Winfrey, my hero?

The world has watched for almost four years as the Biden administration wrought destruction on America, bringing it to the brink of collapse. We have been bombarded by the incompetent Kamala Harris who cackles her way through media appearances.

Donald Trump has a proven track record of accomplishments in office, despite being hampered at every turn by the Democrats. Trump speaks for three or four hours at every rally, generally without a teleprompter, and covers both his policies and vision for making America great again. He has a recovery plan to salvage the nation after four years of Biden.

I do not understand how Oprah put her name behind Kamala Harris, along with so many other celebrities. Have our heroes become followers rather than leaders? I feel shame for what I once admired.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/oh-no-oprah/

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Did Trump Propose Deep Medicare Cuts?

In a recent report, “The Trump-Vance ‘Concept’ on Health Care,” Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign claims that former President Donald Trump proposed “deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid” in his budgets submitted during his term as President, including cuts that would “undermine Medicare’s fiscal position and cut benefits for seniors.”

When it comes to Medicare, these claims are largely false, misleading, and counterproductive.

President Trump’s budgets included proposals to reduce the cost of Medicare through changes to provider payments and drug pricing reforms that have generally received bipartisan support. Specifically, his final budget proposal for Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 included proposed Medicare changes that we find would have:

* Modestly slowed Medicare cost growth – with costs rising by 89 percent over a decade rather than 104 percent and proposed savings representing one-twentieth of projected costs.

* Improved rather than cut benefits by lowering premiums and cost-sharing without reducing covered benefits or meaningfully changing access to care.

* Strengthened rather than undermined the program’s fiscal position, including by extending the solvency of the Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund by at least 25 years.

Health care spending is the largest area of the federal budget and is experiencing rapid growth that threatens to widen deficits and drive the Medicare HI trust fund to insolvency in just 12 years. Lawmakers will need to consider meaningful savings to lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, along with other parts of the budget and tax code.

This presidential campaign has been damaging and unhelpful toward efforts to thoughtfully reform Medicare, with both candidates attacking their opponents for cutting benefits while shying away from offering their own comprehensive plans to address these issues.

This ‘Medi-scare’ tactic only increases the difficulty of implementing urgently needed reforms, thereby making it harder to restore solvency to Medicare HI, lower health care costs for seniors, and reign in deficits.

In their recent report, the Harris campaign claims “Trump will Slash Medicare and Medicaid” and says that “Trump proposed deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid” in the past.

While some of President Trump’s budgets did propose large reductions to federal Medicaid spending, and there will be reasonable disagreements about this approach to health care savings, none of President Trump’s budgets slashed Medicare or proposed deep cuts to the Medicare program.

Under President Trump’s FY 2021 budget, which the Harris campaign specifically cites, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected Medicare costs would have still grown by 89 percent between FY 2020 and 2030 compared to 104 percent under then-current law.

The total Medicare savings proposed in President Trump’s budget were about 5 percent of total Medicare costs from FY 2020 through 2030 – $500 to $600 billion out of more than $10 trillion. For perspective, prescription drugs savings in the Inflation Reduction Act are projected to reduce Medicare costs by 3 percent by FY 2031 compared to current law, and the insolvency of the Medicare HI trust fund is projected to lead to an abrupt 11 percent cut in benefits.

Trump Administration Medicare Policies Would Have Cut Costs, Not Benefits

The Harris campaign claims that “independent analysts have noted that in every single one of his budgets as president, Trump sought to make significant cuts to both Medicare and Medicaid,” and that these cuts “are plainly intended to… cut benefits for seniors.”

This paints a misleading picture, since President Trump’s proposals generally focused on lowering provider payments and drug costs in a way that would have also reduced premiums and cost-sharing paid by seniors, rather than cutting their benefits.

Included in the FY 2021 budget were proposals to reduce bad debt reimbursements, lower excessive post-acute care payments, and adopt site-neutral payments that avoid paying hospitals and hospital-owned clinics more than private doctors’ offices for the same services. These reforms all resemble policies proposed by President Obama. The budget would have also reformed Medicare payments to hospitals for graduate medical education and uncompensated care, and effectively embraced the bipartisan Drug Pricing Act, which was sponsored by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) and ultimately became the basis for some parts of the drug savings provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. Prior budgets included similar proposals, with few if any changes to Medicare benefits.

We have previously described these policies as smart health savings, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – cited in the Harris campaign’s report – has written favorably about them. They would all increase the value of Medicare to beneficiaries and make the program more efficient, not cut benefits for seniors.

It is worth noting that, while the Trump Administration’s budgets included bipartisan savings proposals that would have improved the overall financial health of the HI trust fund and lowered costs for taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries, President Trump has not embraced any of these proposals as part of his 2024 campaign platform.

Trump Administration Medicare Policies Would Have Strengthened the Program’s Fiscal Position

The Harris campaign has claimed that President Trump’s “proposed budgets identify numerous cuts that are plainly intended to undermine Medicare’s fiscal position...”. However, the savings in President Trump’s budgets would have improved Medicare’s fiscal position.

Under current law, the Medicare Trustees project the HI trust fund will run out of reserves in 2036, while CBO estimates the overall cost of Medicare will rise from 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in FY 2024 to 5.4 percent by 2054.

According to his FY 2021 budget, President Trump’s Medicare proposals would have “extend[ed] the solvency of the Medicare program by at least 25 years” by reducing the cost of some parts of the Medicare HI program and moving funding for medical residents outside of Medicare.

Furthermore, while the overall Medicare savings in the FY 2021 budget were relatively modest, they would have slowed the average annual growth rate of Medicare spending from 7.4 percent per year to 6.6 percent through FY 2030. If Medicare growth were to slow by 0.8 percentage points annually for the next 30 years, costs would rise to 4.3 percent of GDP by FY 2054 instead of the 5.4 percent projected in the baseline – a meaningful improvement.

“Medi-scare” Tactics Are Harmful and Counterproductive

Accusing opponents of trying to slash Medicare and conflating reductions in Medicare spending with cuts to benefits is an all too common tactic employed by both political parties. Sometimes described as “Medi-scare,” this approach has not only been used against former President Trump, but also against GOP presidential candidates Bob Dole and John McCain, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and even against Vice President Kamala Harris. And time and again, these claims have been debunked.

With health care costs continuing to grow and the Medicare HI trust fund less than 12 years from insolvency, there is an urgent need for policymakers to find ways to shore up the program and avoid large automatic cuts to hospitals and other providers, which would lead to a shortage of care.

There are numerous ways to lower health care costs and restore solvency to Medicare – many with bipartisan support.

Ultimately, the efforts of both 2024 presidential candidates to gain political advantage by describing reasonable Medicare cost savings as “deep cuts” only serve to take needed solutions for dealing with the unsustainable growth of Medicare and other government programs off the table.

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/did-trump-propose-deep-medicare-cuts

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Elite still in thrall to Marxist Propaganda

WWII was largely a titanic struggle between two great authoritarian regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. For postwar American "progressives" a big problem with that was that it was the most Leftist of those two regimes which survived. Progressivism and Communism were very similar in what they preached: "All men are equal" was the lodestar for both. So could Progressivism be seen as in danger of moving farther Left and developing into an authoritarian regime like the Soviets? It was an obvious concern. The similarity between Soviet doctrines and progressive doctrines had to be seen as a warning of what could come.

American Progressives were somewhat sheltered from that perception by the fact that the progressive FDR had recently taken part in defeating one of the two great authoritarian regimes, Nazism. But that was not enough. The progressive era came to an end with the election in 1953 of the centrist "Ike".

But it was an uncomfortable situation for the Left so Leftist intellectuals greeted with a gladsome heart the work of a group of neo-Marxist psychologists who used a chain of devious reasoning to "prove" that all was not as it seemed and conservatives were the "real" authoritarians, thus exonerating the Left from any authoritarian tendencies.

http://jonjayray.com/concis2.html

That claim flew in the face of the great Soviet horror looming over everyone's heads but it was reality enough for Leftist intellectuals. Denying reality is a Leftist talent.

And for Marxists to claim that authoritarianism is conservative is perhaps the biggest laugh of all. Who said this:

"Revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon"

They are of course the well-known words of Friedrich Engels -- from his controversy with the anarchists. Yes: THAT Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx. So Engels was quite frank about the authoritarian nature of Leftism but such frankness did not suit latter-day Marxists at all.

That conservatives are the real authoritarians was in any case a very tough sell. It was the Left who wanted to impose their ideas upon society through all sorts of changes. The conservatives simply wanted to stop them doing that. Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian. If making people do things that they do not want to do and making them stop doing things that they want to do is not authoritarian what else would be?

Nonetheless, the gross fiction that Leftism is not authoritarian has survived largely untroubled in the minds of psychologists and Leftists generally. As an idea, it is just too pleasing to abandon. In recent years, however,there does seem to have been some unshackling in some minds from that idea. So we have on some occasions had books and articles appearing that try to face reality. Below is a precis of a recent such book


Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left

Luke Conway

The political left has an urgent and rising problem with authoritarianism. An alarmingly high percentage of self-identified progressives are punitive, bullying, and intolerant of disagreement – and the problem is getting worse.

Using his own cutting-edge research, leading psychologist Luke Conway shows that it’s not just right-wing extremists who long for an authority figure to crush their enemies, silence opponents and restore order; it’ s also those who preach ‘be kind’ and celebrate their ‘inclusivity.’ A persistent proportion of left-wingers demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, and they’re becoming more emboldened as they gain cultural and political power. On a range of scientific and social issues, they are increasingly advocating censorship over free debate, disregarding the rule of law, and dehumanising their opponents. These tendencies are part of an accelerating ‘threat circle’ of mutual hatred and fear between left and right that could tear apart our basic democratic norms.

Concluding with an eloquent call for firm but rational resistance to this rising tide of liberal bullying, Conway presents a way forward for our hyper-partisan era.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Liberal-Bullies-Left-Authoritarianism-Problem/dp/1800752059

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US election has been flipped upside down as Donald Trump takes swing state polling lead

Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 US election, according to the latest polling. The former US President has made a stunning comeback with just 19 days until election day.

His Democrat opponent Kamala Harris, who had been leading, has been losing ground in the key battleground states that will decide the election.

Recently, Ms Harris mantained a lead in the popular vote of about +2 points, but that has since slipped to +1.4.

However, the election is not determined by the popular vote. It is decided by the US electoral college system.

Under the system, each US state is apportioned a number of presidential electors, to a total of 538, with a majority of 270 or more needed required to elect the president.

While most of the states lean either heavily blue or red, the swing states can be decided by razor-thin margins.

The latest RealClear Polling numbers bode well for Mr Trump, and are a worrying sign for Ms Harris. The site aggregates the results of numerous polls into averages.

Mr Trump holds a narrow lead +0.3 point lead in Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes. He’s also ahead in North Carolina by +1.4 points. Mr Trump is also poised to flip Georgia and is leading there by +0.7 points.

Ms Harris has maintained a slight lead of +0.3 in Wisconsin.

Mr Trump is leading by +1.0 in Michigan, a state with a second-largest Arab population in the country, and where the Israel-Hamas war could play a role.

Ms Harris looks set to win Minnesota and is leading by +4.7.

Mr Trump is likely to flip Arizona and is leading by +1.1.

He is also slightly in front in Nevada, with a +0.5 margin.

New Hampshire is set to stay blue, with Ms Harris up +7.4 as is Virginia where she leads by j+6.4.

Texas, which some thought may be competitive, is in fact not — as Mr Trump leads by +5.8.

If Mr Trump does indeed win every state that he’s currently ahead in, that would give him 302 electoral college votes.

However, Ms Harris is doing better according to the numbers published by polling site FiveThirtyEight, where she has a 54 per cent chance of being elected president.

The betting markets have also swung in favour of Mr Trump, with Sportsbet now paying $1.67 for a Trump win and $2.25 for a Harris victory.

The election remains incredibly close and even slight voting changes can have significant impacts on the final result.

The election campaign took a bizarre turn as Mr Trump swayed to music for about 30 minutes on stage at a televised town hall event on Monday (local time).

Initially, the event in Oaks near Philadelphia was standard fare ahead of the November 5 election, as Mr Trump took friendly questions from supporters on the economy and cost of living.

With the session moderated by a loyal right-wing ally, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Mr Trump was on cruise control — although he got the election date wrong by two months, urging supporters to vote “on January 5.”

After the town hall paused for two audience members who required medical attention, Mr Trump then switched focus.

Jokingly asking whether “anybody else would like to faint,” Mr Trump declared: “Let’s not do any more questions.”

“Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” Mr Trump said.

And so they did: for more than half an hour, the Mr Trump playlist blasted while the candidate mostly stood on stage listening and slowly dancing.

Mr Trump has made a brief, jerky dance his signature at the end of rallies for years, nearly always to his exit song — the Village People’s 1978 disco anthem YMCA.

This time, he stayed on stage for nine songs, ranging from opera to a series of his favorites, including Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain, Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of Hallelujah, Elvis and of course YMCA.

And his dance routine expanded from the familiar jerky motion to a slow swaying. Often, however, he did not dance but stood in place and stared out into the crowd and sometimes pointed at people.

Later on Tuesday, Mr Trump later got into a heated exchange with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.

Discussing Mr Trump’s plan to enact tariffs, Mr Micklethwait repeatedly asked how Mr Trump would enact high tariffs on foreign companies without getting an economic blowback on the American consumer in exchange.

Mr Trump responded his policy would have a positive effect, and later slammed the journalist saying: “You’ve been wrong all your life”.

Playing the health card

Ms Harris, meanwhile, has tried to pivot the conversation to Mr Trump’s health after a medical report was published showing she is in “excellent health”.

She has since challenged Mr Trump to publish his own health records.

“Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”

Speaking to reporters on Saturday ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Ms Harris called Mr Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example of his lack of transparency.”

“It’s obvious that his team at least, does not want the American people to see everything about who he is … and whether or not he is actually fit to do the job of being president of the United States,” she said.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/us-election-has-been-flipped-upside-down-as-donald-trump-takes-swing-state-polling-lead/news-story/ee3a9fdf7d95646468019d49c8cbbafa

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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