Wednesday, September 30, 2015



A hate-fest at the British Labour Party conference

Everything in Brighton seems to be turning pink, and not just the Moon. Labour’s conference is in the grip of red-threaded, Marxoid ab-dabs. The oratory here is hyperbolised in its fury, quite possibly a bit bonkers.

Broad-bellied blokes spank spadelike palms over their heads, so hard it’s a wonder they don’t bruise them. The Tories were more than once yesterday compared to Nazi concentration camp guards. Big business was slandered. Sloganeering was denounced – with slogans!

Cue numerous mentions of Mrs Thatcher and the Eighties. We had a 75-year-old man wearing a coal-miner’s helmet with ‘Coal Not Dole’ stickers. Did he get it from the wardrobe mistress at West End musical ‘Billy Elliot’?

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, in carmine-shaded tie, gave a speech so lacking in theatricality, it actually became rather fascinatingly theatrical. Mr McDonnell flexed his jaw muscles, ground his molars, stared at the TV cameras as though about to butt them. Alex Ferguson after a Man United defeat.

Gosh he was furious. Albanian newscasters in the Enver Hoxha days were more skittish.

He warned delegates that it was going to be a speech unencumbered by his usual ‘rants’. ‘There’s no jokes – they get me into trouble,’ he said. In truth, Mr McDonnell has never been Jimmy Tarbuck.

He proceeded to intone a brief, blunt statement of intentions, including an ‘aggressive’ (yet unspecified) balancing of the books. Menace swirled around him like cigar smoke.

He coldly said how ‘disappointed’ he was that some Labour MPs had declined to serve on Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper & Co should maybe avoid any men with sharp-ferruled umbrellas.

Happily, other comrades were prepared to be heroes of the Revolution. Mr McDonnell named certain economists who would be assisting his great project. And all hail former Civil Service chief Bob Kerslake, who had agreed to look into firing squads at the Treasury to exterminate wrong thinkers, or something like that. Can this be the same bumbling, bungling Bob Kerslake whose recent departure from Whitehall was a source of hat-hurling relief to his fellow Permanent Secretraries? It can!

For all the stuff about ‘new politics’, the language was prosaic. Mr McDonnell envisaged a ‘concrete alternative for a green economy’. There was a lazy riff about ‘the skills, development and innovation critical to compete in a globalised economy’. ‘Let me make this absolutely clear,’ he said, before being opaque on his tax-raising plans.

The tone was that of a Soviet tractor factory superintendent. His final word? ‘Solidarity!’, shouted with a clenched fist.

Earlier we had heard from dimpled charmer Diane Abbott. She was wearing a Guantanamo Bay orangey-red trouser suit, possibly a size or three on the small side. Front row spectators would have been well advised to shield their eyes in case a button pinged off its moorings like a sniper’s bullet.

Sister Abbott, a supporter of private education, complained in pukka accent about the Tories’ ‘callous’ attitude to the poor, particularly with regard to foreign aid. Eh? David Cameron has spent billions on aid.


Abbott

As Miss Abbott stomped back to her chair she had her right ear nibbled by sometime swoon Mr Corbyn. And a woman with copper-washed hair, first name Sioux (as in Red Indians), announced that Jeremy Corbyn gave ‘wonderful hugs’. Of the Government’s proposal for a Bill of Rights she said, ‘we might as well walk into the gas chambers today’. Mr Corbyn enjoyed that remark so much, he snogged her, too. He’s a hands-on leader.

That was not the only Nazi allusion. Union heavy ‘Red Len’ McCluskey, the grey-stubbled Obi Wan Kenobi of Corbynism, fulminated about the ‘Fascist dictatorship’ of David Cameron. He compared Tory reforms on strike ballots to Hitler’s imposition of red-triangle badges on inmates of Dachau concentration camp. Having got that off his chest, Mr McCluskey came over all Basil Fotherington-Thomas and started to quote poetry by Emily Dickinson

Former MP Candy Atherton, in a red dress, hit some sort of pothole on stage with her wheelchair. ‘I’m stuck!’ she squealed. Miss Atherton had just given a speech which suggested that the Tories could take us back to the days of 18th century slavery. Messrs Corbyn and McDonnell attended her stalled vehicle like a couple of AA mechanics.

    The moment of the day? A speech by Lloyd Duddridge from Ilford, north London. Addressing delegates as ‘fellow fighters’, Mr Duddridge called for a social ‘safety net’ for workers who took risks. Who could he mean? ‘People trying to write a bloody book,’ he said. Writers of the world, unite. In a summons that will resonate with Mr Corbyn’s friends at the Guardian and the BBC, this Duddridge cried: ‘We need to take that fight to our dinner parties!

SOURCE






Gen. Dees: Social Experimentation is Degrading Our Military Readiness

The military readiness of the United States is being “degraded by social experimentation,” Maj. Gen. Robert Dees (U.S. Army-Ret.) said Saturday at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.

Dees said that the Obama administration’s use of the military for “social engineering” on controversial gay and gender issues is detrimental to the nation’s ability to defend itself.

“Not only are we losing physical readiness to fight, we have to fix the problem of moral readiness,” he said on a panel chaired by Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (US Army-Ret.).

“I think the moral readiness of our forces is even more important than the physical readiness, which is very low,” Dees later told CNSNews.com. “The moral readiness is degraded by social experimentation within our military.

“In fact, social experimentation is improperly named because it’s not an experiment at all. It’s a top-driven mandate for social agendas that occurs by this administration within the military, which is a captive audience.

“It is not enhancing our readiness; it declines our readiness. We’re spending more time on some of these social engineering projects than we are on developing and maintaining readiness in our force.”

CNSNews.com asked Dees what message President Obama’s nomination of an openly gay secretary of the Army sends to members of the military, especially those who are Christians.

“Well, I think it’s a very loud statement by the administration. It’s not an accident. We respect all people and yet, it’s tantamount to lighting the White House in rainbow colors,” he replied.

The general added that “even though there’s some guidelines in place, there’s guerilla warfare within the military in a similar way that there’s guerilla warfare within our culture.

“People who would seek to strike religion from our land are working very aggressively out in the various parts of the military to strike down religious freedoms even if it’s against the existing regulations. They will press and push for whatever they can get away with.”

The inevitable result of such conflict is “a rash of poor leaders, and in many cases toxic leaders within the military,” Dees said. “Young people are not seeing selfless servants…the very best of our officers are the ones who leave first.”

“Faith in the foxhole is critically important,” the general added. “We in the military know that [the troops] don’t want to be politically correct, they want to be God correct.”

SOURCE







US should never vote in the UN General Assembly

By Jeff Jacoby

EACH YEAR, THE United Nations General Assembly passes a resolution condemning the US economic embargo on Cuba. Each year, the United States, joined by a dwindling number of friends, votes against the resolution. Passage is a foregone conclusion. The vote last year was 188-2.

The resolution has no legal effect. It is merely a vehicle for inveighing against Washington, and for pretending that communist Cuba’s long record of economic failure and human-rights abuse is somehow the fault of the United States.

For 23 years, under Republican and Democratic presidents, the United States has opposed the antiembargo measure. But now comes word that the Obama administration may abstain from this year’s vote, an unprecedented step. “It is unheard-of for a UN member state not to oppose resolutions critical of its own laws,” the Associated Press reported last Monday, and some congressional leaders are aghast that President Obama would consider shirking his sovereign obligation to defend US interests before the world body. Even if he favors repealing the Cuban embargo (which President Bill Clinton signed in 1996), it remains the law of the land. Until that changes, says outgoing House Speaker John Boehner, the president has a “responsibility to defend US law, and that’s what [he] should do.”

An abstention on the UN vote would be in keeping with this administration’s practice of flouting, ignoring, or refusing to defend provisions of law it finds inconvenient, in matters ranging from immigration to health insurance to recess appointments to marriage. It isn’t only Republicans or conservatives — or lawmakers — who have objected to Obama’s presidential overreach. You can agree with the president’s position that a statute ought to be repealed or amended, while still expecting him to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as the Constitution requires.

Yet on the General Assembly resolution, I would defend an abstention, even though I strongly oppose Obama’s Cuba policy. Indeed, I would go further. Were it my call, the US ambassador to the United Nations would never cast a vote in the General Assembly.

The suggestion isn’t original. It was proposed in the 1960s by the political theorist James Burnham, who died in 1987. To vote on General Assembly resolutions, he argued, is to lend them an authority to which serious countries like the United States know they aren’t entitled. If that was true in Burnham’s day, it is even truer now, when the General Assembly is dominated by corrupt, authoritarian, or tyrannical governments that are hostile to democratic liberties and contemptuous of human dignity. We should not indulge the pretense that there is moral significance to any proposition merely because a majority of the UN’s membership endorses it.

The United Nations was born 70 years ago this October with the ratification of a charter committing member-states to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” To be sure, those ideals were always aspirational. But what remains of them? Look at the UN today and what do you see? The world’s cruelest dictatorships seated on the Human Rights Council. A monomaniacal hostility toward Israel. Global financial and sexual scandals. Thundering applause for speeches by tyrants and terrorists. The General Assembly has become a moral wasteland and a monument to hypocrisy.

We cannot simply walk away from the UN. But we can at least decline to solemnize the farce by voting on General Assembly resolutions. The Security Council is different: Its resolutions can have legal force and we have veto power. But in the General Assembly, where cynicism reigns, we gain nothing by voting. Certainly America’s views should be explained and defended. But when the question is called, the United States should abstain. On every issue, every time.

SOURCE






Australia: Is Clueless Clemmie emulating that vicious British barrister feminist?





I want to say something about Clementine Ford's latest emission just to provide the balance that her Fascist thinking lacks but I am initially a little struck by her new photo.  See above.

Her old photo with its furiously red lipstick still accompanies her actual column but on the main page of the SMH there is now a much softer picture of her.  Is she hoping to trap rebarbative old reactionaries like me into praising her looks?  After the Charlotte Proudperson episode in Britain she should be so lucky!  NEVER praise a feminist's looks!  So what is the new image about?  Does she want a Lesbian bit on the side?  I guess that's it. Lesbian couples I have known did have one attractive female. 

But on to the important stuff:  In a typical Fascist way, she wants the government to solve our problems -- in this case the problem of violence against women.  But how CAN a government do that?  Turnbull has announced that he will spend a lot of money on it but that is just window-dressing.  Is he going to put a policeman in every home? Of course not.  Governments may be able to scratch at the margins of the problem but large and inherited  male/female differences will always be there and will in extreme and rare cases result in frustrations great enough to evoke violence.

All that the polity can reasonably do is provide refuges for threatened women and severe punishment for those men who do physically attack women.  But as far as I can tell, that is already pretty much in place.  Some problems will never be completely solved and a mature person learns to know when an  asymptote (limit) has been approached.

Just some excerpts from Clemmie below -- JR


Over the two, long years that Tony Abbott was Prime Minister, very little was done to address the scourge of men's violence against women. This sustained, brutal form of misogyny currently sees around 6 women killed per month while claiming the lives of just under 60 women this year*. Despite the arrogant appointment of himself to the office of Prime Minister for Women, Abbott's interest in issues affecting women's lives remained rooted in the retro ideology that assumes our greatest challenges lie in feeding our families and keeping our energy bills down.

Indeed, rather than direct even a skerrick of the attention given to combating fictional terror threats and desperate refugees fleeing war-torn countries, the Abbott government actually withdrew funding from organisations offering vital services to the victims of family violence. During the exit speech supposedly listing all of the successes of his government, Abbott reemphasised his disinterest in the impact of family violence when he said, "Then there's the challenge of ice and domestic violence, yet to be addressed."

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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