I am not going to name any of them but many conservative writers have recently posted strong criticisms of the Trump/Pelosi spending deal

The spending being envisaged goes far beyond  what taxes will bring in so where is the money coming from?

There are two answers to that:  Borrowing money and simply printing any extra money you need.  But you can't do that! many people will say.  You just can't print money willy nilly!  Sadly, you can -- if you are President of the United States or some other country.  And ever since the gold standard was abolished, all governments have been doing just that.  Normally, however, governments are pretty cautious about how much new money they create. Milton Friedman's recommendation that the money supply should be expanded by no more than 4% p.a. is normally somewhere in the ballpark.

Obama, however, really got the bit between his teeth and created a huge pile of new money.  He was no Friedmanite and if he wanted to spend money on something he spent it.  And the media stayed Shtumm about it.

Now normally, that should have created galloping inflation.  The buying power of the greenback should have dropped sharply.  In Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and Venezuela that has happened.  Runaway spending shot all prices up to previously unimagined levels, which completely destroyed people's savings.  Even big savings could no longer buy much.  Money that could once have bought a car might now only buy you a cup of coffee.

So why has that not happened in the USA? That's the big question.  Economists have no clear answer to it.  Some of the new money has gone into increased real estate prices and some has gone into historically low interest rates and some has gone into increased reserves held by financial institutions but there must be something more.  But what? And how long will the party go on?  Nobody knows.

But Trump is a qualified economist so he can see clearly what has happened and has decided that he will join the party.  He has decided that Obama must not have all the fun.  So he is in fact set to outspend Obama, which gives all conservative economists severe heartburn.

So is he wrong?  Is he building up a financial disaster for all Americans? Conventional economic theory says he is but actual practice in the Obama era says he isn't.  We are in an era of great gaps between economic theory and economic reality.  But that gap does create an opportunity for "free" infrastructure spending.  Obame spent the "free" money he created on gifts to Iran etc. So big infrastructure spending is at least a lot better than that.  Trump is simply using the time-out from economic orthodoxy on projects which will have lasting value.  He is very canny to have seen the opportunity and seized it.  He should be congratulated, not condemned for his wise spending.


Mexico sets 1st half murder record, up 5.3%

Does America need a population like this?  We do know that Mexican gangsters are among the illegals already in the USA and we do know that just about the whole of Latin America is violent and corrupt -- with some central American populations being even more lawless than Mexico.

So it is clear that Latin America has an inferior culture by almost any criterion.  And the people from there are going to bring that culture with them. They are not about to become Episcopalians

And among the behavioural products of that culture are what we see described below -- behaviour that creates a very dangerous, unsafe and chaotic society.  Who wants that? Latin Americans are just NOT desirable immigrants.  Many of them may individually be of no concern but in the mass of them are many people that the USA could well do without


Mexico set a new record for homicides in the first half of the year as the number of murders grew by 5.3% compared to the same period of 2018, fueled partly by cartel and gang violence in several states.

Mexico saw 3,080 killings in June, an increase of over 8% from the same month a year ago, according to official figures. The country of almost 125 million now sees as many as 100 killings per day nationwide.

The 17,608 killings in the first half of 2019 is the most since comparable records began being kept in 1997, including the peak year of Mexico’s drug war in 2011. Officials said 16,714 people were killed in the first half of 2018.

In particular, drug cartel turf wars have become increasingly bloody in the northern state of Sonora, where the number of homicides was up by 69% in the first half of the year. But in Sinaloa, where the cartel of convicted drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is based, homicides declined by 23% so far this year compared to last.

Given cutbacks and a widespread reorganization of security forces under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, it is not clear who, if anyone, is doing the analysis and intelligence work to find out exactly which conflicts are causing the rise in homicides.

“I could give you 10 potential, plausible reasons, but the truth is we don’t know, and that is perhaps the biggest problem,” said security analyst Alejandro Hope. “There is very little systematic research that would allow us to conclude what is really happening.”

And other types of crime, like extortion, have become increasingly frequent and violent.

As if to underscore that, officials said Monday the five men killed Sunday at a bar in the resort of Acapulco were allegedly part of a gang of extortionists who shook down business owners for protection payments.

Guerrero state prosecutor Jorge Zuriel “we now know that the members of this gang met daily at this bar to coordinate charging extortion payments and to collect the daily take.”

One suspect has been arrested in the shootings, which left six people wounded. Zuriel said the killers were members of a rival gang.

SOURCE 




The time when all Republicans were RINOs

There has always been a lot of conservatism in America but it has not always had a political voice.  The long rule (4 terms!) of Democrat presidential hero FDR had so thoroughly captured the media, the bureaucracy and the educational system that it was almost impossible for a conservative to get heard.  There was an absolute liberal consensus among public voices.  Liberals really believed that there was no reasonable alternative to liberralism and therefore saw conservative utterances as simply kooky. And their view prevailed.  So even the Republican party has become basically liberal -- just an alternative liberal voice

That could not continue, however.  The first conservative voice to gain some respect was Bill Buckley.  He was very much like an affluent Eastern states liberal and was always highly clubbable, respectful of indiviual liberals and very well-spoken and literate.  He could reason with liberals in their terms.  His impact was however only in Eastern States clubland.  He was not a man of the people

Then along comes Barry Goldwater.  From here on I quote from here:


AT the beginning of the 1960s conservatives were in a better position than at any time since the 1930s to challenge moderate Republicans for control of the party. But large obstacles remained. Not only were conservatives widely viewed as wild-eyed fanatics but they squabbled among themselves, had trouble articulating a positive program of reform, had few grassroots organizations, and lacked the funding to make the movement a serious political force.

The year 1960, though, brought a turning point for the conservative movement. That year Barry Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative. Generally dismissed in the national media, the book stands today as one of the most important political tracts in modern American history.

As the historian Robert Alan Goldberg demonstrates in Barry Goldwater, his fine new biography, The Conscience of a Conservative advanced the conservative cause in several ways. Building on William F. Buckley's pathbreaking work at National Review, Goldwater adeptly reconciled the differences between traditionalists and libertarians. The expansion of the welfare state, he wrote, was an unfortunate and dangerous development that undermined individual freedom. Suggesting that New Deal liberalism marked the first step on the road to totalitarianism, Goldwater argued that government should be removed from most areas of American life.

Yet he was no strict libertarian. Appealing to those on the right who longed to recapture lost certitudes, he argued that the state had a duty to maintain order and promote virtue. "Politics," Goldwater wrote, is "the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order."

Goldwater also united disparate conservative factions by focusing their attention on the dangers of Soviet communism. He wrote,

"And still the awful truth remains: We can establish the domestic conditions for maximizing freedom, along the lines I have indicated, and yet become slaves. We can do this by losing the Cold War to the Soviet Union."

Goldwater rejected the containment strategies that had guided U.S. foreign policy since the late 1940s, and called for an aggressive strategy of liberation. Conservatives might disagree about the proper role of government in American life, but surely they could unite to defeat the "Soviet menace."

Goldwater also dispelled the notion that conservatives were a privileged elite out to promote its own economic interests. "Conservatism," he wrote, "is not an economic theory." Rather, it "puts material things in their proper place" and sees man as "a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires." According to one right-wing magazine, Goldwater gave conservatives humanitarian reasons for supporting policies usually "associated with a mere lust for gain."

But perhaps the greatest achievement of Goldwater's book--and the reason for its startling success with the right--was that it gave conservatives, for the first time, a blueprint for translating their ideas into political action. In his introduction Goldwater rejected the idea that conservatism was "out of date."

"The charge is preposterous and we ought boldly to say so. The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline. The principles on which the Conservative political position is based ... are derived from the nature of man, and from the truths that God has revealed about His creation. Circumstances do change. So do the problems that are shaped by circumstances. But the principles that govern the solution of the problems do not. To suggest that the Conservative philosophy is out of date is akin to saying that the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments or Aristotle's Politics are out of date."

Supporting states' rights, lower taxes, voluntary Social Security, and a strengthened military, Goldwater emphasized the positive in his philosophy and demonstrated "the practical relevance of Conservative principles to the needs of the day."

That altered the American political landscape, galvanizing the right and turning Goldwater into the most popular conservative in the country. By 1964, just four years after its release, the book had gone through more than twenty printings, and it eventually sold 3.5 million copies. "Was there ever such a politician as this?" one Republican asked in disbelief. The Conscience of a Conservative "was our new testament," Pat Buchanan has said. "It contained the core beliefs of our political faith, it told us why we had failed, what we must do. We read it, memorized it, quoted it.... For those of us wandering in the arid desert of Eisenhower Republicanism, it hit like a rifle shot."

REPUBLICAN Party leaders, however, ignored the "Goldwater boomlet." Vice President Richard Nixon, the front-runner for the 1960 Republican nomination, believed that the greatest threat to the party came not from the right but from the left. In July, Nixon met with Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, and agreed to change the party platform to win moderate-Republican support. Conservatives were outraged, referring to the pact, in Goldwater's words, as the "Munich of the Republican Party."

A few days later, at the Republican National Convention, an angry Goldwater called on conservatives to "grow up" and take control of the party. And that, according to Brennan, is exactly what they set out to do. At a time when "liberal and moderate Republicans, like the rest of the country at that time and like historians ever since, continued to view conservatives in a one-dimensional mode," conservatives believed that Goldwater's popularity, the rise of a conservative press, and the growing strength of conservative youth groups boded well for the future.

Increasingly disillusioned with Republican moderates and with the whole tenor of American political debate, the right began to see organization as the key to political power. In the midst of the 1960 presidential campaign, for example, William Buckley, the conservative fundraiser Marvin Liebman, and almost a hundred student activists met at Buckley's estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and formed Young Americans for Freedom. Within six months the organization could claim more than a hundred campus and precinct-level political-action groups and at least 21,000 dues-paying members. Using newsletters, radio broadcasts, and frequent rallies, YAF had almost overnight become a powerful nationwide movement.

Had Young Americans for Freedom and other grassroots organizations remained isolated from one another, their impact would have been weak. But in 1961 the political activist F. Clifton White organized a movement to nominate a conservative for President. Traveling around the country, White exhorted conservatives to seize control of their local party organizations and elect conservative delegates to the national convention. The movement orchestrated by White gave conservatives control over the Republican Party and helped to persuade Goldwater to run for President.

Capturing the presidential nomination was one thing; winning the presidency proved much more difficult. In the early 1960s conservatives tried to distance themselves from the radical right. No group troubled conservatives more than the John Birch Society. With organizations in all fifty states, thousands of members (who, according to Brennan, were "zealous letter writers, demonstrators, and voters"), and a full-time staff, the society wielded significant influence. But Birchers, many of whom believed that Dwight Eisenhower and other government officials were Communist agents, tarnished the reputations of more-rational conservatives.

Buckley understood the problem: conservatism, he explained, had to bring "into our ranks those people who are, at the moment, on our immediate left--the moderate, wishy-washy conservatives. ... I am talking ... about 20 to 30 million people.... If they are being asked to join a movement whose leadership believes the drivel of Robert Welch [the founder of the John Birch Society], they will pass by crackpot alley, and will not pause until they feel the warm embrace of those way over on the other side, the Liberals."

But in 1964 Goldwater could not escape the taint of extremism. Brennan points out that despite their sporadic attacks on the radical right, conservatives were still political neophytes. Goldwater and his supporters believed that all they had to do was expose Americans to conservative ideas. But Goldwater had no positive program, and spent much of the campaign railing against Social Security and threatening to roll back the Communist tide. Moderate Republicans labeled him a racist and a warmonger, and Goldwater seemed to confirm such charges when he threatened to "lob" missiles "into the men's room at the Kremlin."

Perhaps most damaging, the media condemned him as a kook who sounded more like Adolf Hitler than like a Republican presidential candidate. Norman Mailer, writing in Esquire, compared the Republican National Convention to a Nazi rally. The columnist Drew Pearson described the "smell of fascism" in the air. Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, told readers of The New York Times that "a man came out of the beer halls of Munich, and rallied the forces of Rightism in Germany" and that "all the same elements are there in San Francisco now." When Democrats mocked Goldwater's campaign slogan, "In your heart, you know he's right," by adding, "Yes, extreme Right," Goldwater's candidacy was doomed.

Poor campaign management, Goldwater's image, and the lack of unity in the Republican Party contributed to the Democratic landslide in November of 1964. But whereas liberals saw the election results as the final repudiation of the American right, conservatives took solace in Goldwater's 27 million votes and vowed not to repeat their mistakes. What appeared to be a defeat for conservatives was actually a dramatic success: Goldwater had paved the way for a generation of Republicans by appealing to the "forgotten" and "silent" Americans "who quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving." He had also raised new social and moral issues that would prove vital to future conservative successes.

But the liberals, of course, never gave up and used their continuing control of the media to reassert their old consensus.  And that reached its highpoint in the Obama regime. They nearly got their old dominance back.  Like all Leftist regimes, however, it was intrinsically authoritarian and that paved the way for a big wave of dissent.  And that rejection of a kid-gloves dictatorship brought  Donald Trump to power. The lesson from it all is that the Left never gives up and never learns.  So, sadly, our fight with them must never cease.

There is a video below of a Barry Goldwater speech that describes an America that sounds distressingly familiar:




The old aspartame scare again

So many studies showed no cause for concern among humans that I thought this scare had died out.

The evidence offered by the aptly-named Prof Millstone below is laughable.  He says some people have come to him saying that they have problems that they BELIEVE to be related to Aspartame consumption. What a scientific absurdity.  Some people believe that the earth is flat too.

He also says that a roughly equal number of studies showed harm and no harm.  He implies that all the studies concerned were of equal quality.  I have looked at some of the studies that claim to incriminate Aspartame.  The regulators rejected them for good reason.  You get things like very high doses on RATS being harmful (Soffritti) and human studies (Walton) with a non-random sample of 40 clinically depressed people given high doses outside the normal combination with food.  Complete junk

Underlying the scare is the familiar Greenie hostility to anything that is modern and not "natural"



British experts have cast doubt on the safety of an artificial sweetener used in thousands of products including big brand diet soft drinks from Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

Academics at the University of Sussex claim that an EU food watchdog assessment giving a clean bill of health to aspartame, a calorie-free sugar alternative, was seriously flawed.

Professor Erik Millstone, who has been a long-time critic of the additive, argues that there are many scientific studies that raise legitimate safety questions together with circumstantial evidence of neurological harm.

As a result, he is calling for the suspension of authorisation to sell or use aspartame in the EU pending an independent investigation.

He argues that anything from 2-10 per cent of consumers suffer neurological effects, ranging from blurred vision to headaches and, in a small number of worst cases, seizures. 'I have had about 250 people come to me saying they think aspartame caused a problem,' he said.

'I would describe it as strong circumstantial evidence that they have had neurological symptoms and have eventually come to the conclusion aspartame was responsible.'

Prof Millstone has previously been criticised by the makers of aspartame, who have questioned his expertise, accused him of ignoring scientific evidence and suggested he is obsessed.

Aspartame is roughly 200 times sweeter than table sugar and has been used as a calorie-free alternative in more than 6,000 consumer foods and drinks, including Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Pepsi Max.

It is sold worldwide under the trade names NutraSweet, Candarel and Equal.

A research paper by Prof Millstone and Dr Elisabeth Dawson details what it says are serious flaws in the way the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) assessed research on aspartame in 2013 and declared it safe. The academics argue that – since 1974 – scientists have warned of the risks of brain damage, liver and lung cancer, and brain lesions.

They also point to an EU-funded project published in 2010, which found that pregnant women who consume a high number of fizzy drinks containing artificial sweeteners appeared to be at greater risk of having a premature baby.

The study, published in the Archives of Public Health, says an EFSA panel discounted the results of 73 studies that indicated aspartame could be harmful, but treated 84 per cent of studies providing no evidence of harm as useful and reliable.

Gavin Partington, director-general at the British Soft Drinks Association, said: 'The author of this study is a committed critic of aspartame, despite the substantial body of scientific research that undermines his claims.

According to all leading health authorities in the world, as well as Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK, low- and no-calorie sweeteners are safe.

'A study on behalf of the UK Food Standards Agency found no negative health links related to consumption of aspartame.'

The EFSA stood by its decision to authorise aspartame. It said: 'EFSA's opinion represents one of the most comprehensive risk assessments of aspartame undertaken.

After a review of all available scientific data and consumption information, EFSA concluded that aspartame [is] safe for human consumption at current levels of exposure.'

The International Sweeteners Association, which speaks for manufacturers, said: 'The EFSA scientific opinion on aspartame concluded that aspartame is not a safety concern.'

SOURCE



Why I was once fired from a State government bureaucracy

It has just occurred to me that I have never written anything about the time I was sacked from the NSW Public Service.  It has never been a secret.  It just didn't seem important in my scale of values.  But maybe there are some small lessons to learn from it.  Though it was over 50 years ago now.

When I had completed my B.A. degree with honours in psychology from the University of Qld. at the end of 1967, I decided I needed a change of scene from Brisbane so I moved South to Sydney.  Being Mr Frugality, I had a comfortable level of savings, no debts and a sky blue VW beetle -- so the transition was an unproblematic one.

I did however want a job.  So I went along to the Army recruiting office.  From my time in the CMF in Brisbane I was a fully qualified Sergeant in the Psychology corps so thought I might get work there.  They grabbed me.  An extra qualified hand was very welcome.  So within days of arriving I  was back in the Army!

I was not however interested in an army career so I looked around for an alternative.  So I took the selection test for the NSW public service.  Taking tests is one of the few things I am good at so I got an immediate welcome.  One of the tests I did was a test of computer aptitude.  Bill Bailey was the man in charge of that so he called me in for a chat. He revealed that I had gone off the scale for the test. I had got every single item right.  Bill wanted to see who this freak was!  The reason I did well, however, was not very freakish.  I was by that time already an experienced FORTRAN programmer.  When I told Bill that he was greatly relieved.  It meant that his test had given the right answer after all

I was assigned to the Dept. of Technical Education as a graduate clerk.  Their graduate clerk program was however a typical bureaucratic bungle.  The only work they had for me was filing, something I had done years ago as a junior clerk in the Queensland Dept. of Public Works.  I was quite miffed at being given such dumb work so I refused to do it.  And it was all downhill from there.

Eventually I was transferred to Head office where they gave me some slightly more interesting work. I did what was asked but there was not much of it so I had a lot of spare time on my hands.  I was at the time enrolled with the M.A. program at the University of Sydney so I mostly used the spare time on academic work.  The managers apparently felt unable to do anything about that.

But one morning, just after I had handed in my Master's thesis at U Syd towards the end of the year, I unintentionally slept in and arrived at work late.  That was it!  They had me. Lateness was something they could act on.  So I was promptly fired that day.  There would have been access to an appeal but I didn't bother. I knew I was going on to other things next year.

So I went and saw Harry Beanham, whom I had worked for at one time in Brisbane.  Harry had been impressed with my work in Brisbane.  I sold lots of diehead chasers for him, if anybody knows what they are. Few do. Anyway Harry promptly put me to work preparing his stock for sale.  So in the space of less than a year I had got 3 jobs, none of which were advertised!

Lessons:  Don't be late in a bureaucracy and finding a job is easy if you have usable skills and qualifications.


Trump sues to block New York law allowing Congress to get his state tax records

State taxes require similar information to Federal taxes so the new NY law could be a way around Trump's refusal to publish his Federal tax records.  The new NY law was clearly written to accomplish exactly that.

Confidentiality of tax returns is however something of a bedrock principle of tax law so the new law is unlikely to survive a challenge in the courts.  Whether it does or does not, legal challenges to it could undoubtedly be prolonged well past the next election.

Even if someone does eventually gain the information through the courts he could still be vulnerable to legal action if he publishes it.  That should be sufficient to scare off politicians and major media


President Donald Trump on Tuesday filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining his state tax returns through a newly passed New York law.

The president's lawyers said the state law was nothing more than an effort to get information about his personal finances to embarrass him politically.

The suit referred to an NBC News article on Monday that said Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., was under pressure from fellow Democrats to make use of the new law.

The suit asks the court to provide a declaratory judgment that the committee "lacks a legitimate legislative purpose for obtaining the President's state tax information."

The lawsuit asserts that the law, called the TRUST Act, violates Trump's First Amendment rights. It seeks to block the Ways and Means Committee from being able to request the taxes through the law, prevent New York Attorney General Letitia James from enforcing it, and stop New York Department of Taxation and Finance Commissioner Michael Schmidt from complying with any request for Trump's tax filings.

"The House Rules authorize the Committee to oversee 'Federal laws,' not state tax laws," says the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. "And nothing in the House Rules allows the Committee to demand the private financial information of a sitting President."

The president's personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, said in a statement that the lawsuit was filed as part of "our ongoing efforts to end Presidential harassment."

"The targeting of the president by the House Ways and Means Committee, the New York Attorney General, and a New York tax official violates article 1 of the U.S. Constitution," he said. "The harassment tactics lack a legitimate legislative purpose."

The New York law allows the chairmen of three congressional tax-related committees — the House Ways and Means Committee, Senate Finance Committee and Joint Committee on Taxation — to request the state returns of public officials only after efforts to gain access to federal tax filings through the Treasury Department have failed. Neal is the only Democrat who can use the law.

The legislation states that any "legitimate task" of Congress is a valid reason to make the request, should efforts to obtain the returns at the federal level be stonewalled by the Treasury Department. New York state tax filings are not identical to the federal returns, but contain much of the same information.

"I have every confidence that the president’s legal challenge will fail and New York’s standing offer to support Congress in its oversight role on taxes will remain in effect," New York state Assemblyman David Buchwald, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation, said in a statement. "It's no surprise that the President has moved quickly in an attempt to strike down New York’s tax transparency law as he is fighting the release of his tax returns on every front."

The bill, signed into law this month, was written broadly and makes it easier for New York to turn over the state tax returns of certain public officials to Congress.

Neal said last month he wouldn't use the law to request the state returns because he feels it could harm his attempt at getting the federal filings. Neal sued the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department for those returns citing a section of tax law that states the Treasury Secretary "shall furnish" to congressional tax committees "any return or return information" request by its chairman. The stated purpose of Neal's request is to review the IRS process for auditing presidential returns.

Earlier this month, Neal said House counsel was "reviewing" the law and had "some legitimate concerns" regarding it.

But he is under pressure from Democrats to act. An aide to a Democratic member of Ways and Means told NBC News in a report on Monday that "there has been widespread frustration from members of the committee at how slowly this process has moved."

Trump broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his returns while running for the presidency, claiming he was under audit. Such an audit would not preclude him from releasing the returns, however. A president's returns undergo IRS audits annually.

SOURCE 



Devastated junior footy team has all their competition points stripped because they are TOO GOOD

This absurdity springs from the Leftist obsession with  equality.  But people are not equal and never will be.  It's grossly unjust that people are arbitrarily denied the fairly won fruits of their efforts. Australia is not the Soviet Union yet

It would be different if the competition was unfair.  That does happen. St. Joseph's college at Nudgee in Brisbane in 2010 tried to pull a fast one on those lines.  They recruited a substantial number of Polynesian students using scholarships.  Polynesians tend to be rather large.  They then fielded a Rugby football team that was mainly comprised of Polynesians, who were markedly larger than the Caucasian players from other schools.

Such matches were swiftly stopped for the safety of the players in the other teams. Some teams refused to field with them at all. Another prominent Catholic college threatened to ban their students from playing Rugby altogether. So Nudgee's attempt to gain an unfair advantage just disrupted the fixtures and earned them scorn for bad sportmanship.


A junior football team has been stripped of its shot at a premiership because its players are too good.

The West Australian Football Commission has stripped South Coogee Junior Football Club's Year 10 A division team of all of its premiership points and given them a $500 good behaviour bond.

This was reportedly in reaction to five of the six A team players refused to move to a B division team, which has been struggling to win its league matches.

That means any team playing against the South Coogee A team in the remaining six games is automatically awarded a win - with a victory margin pre-set at 60 points.

The WAFC's attempt to even the competition has left players and parents devastated.

'It is just a shame because these are just young boys who want to play footy yet they are forced to face the politics that goes on behind the scenes, at such a young age,' a club source told WAtoday.

'And the WAFC and other officials wonder why so many are turning their back on footy to play other sports like soccer.

'The reality is, both teams will probably leave and not play next year because of all of this.'

The football team was split after South Fremantle junior competition director Mark Brookes moved a proposal to WAFC in February this year.

The permission was granted on the condition that both teams need to be competitive.

South Coogee's A division team was selected with those who wanted to advance to a higher level and the B division team had players 'who just wanted to play the game with their mates.'

Initially, the teams were supposed to play in A and C divisions, but South Coogee had to field its 'second' team in division B after another football club Willeton withdrew from division C.

The C division team was forced to play in the B division.

WAFC and officials from South Coogee Junior Football have been contacted for their comments.

SOURCE 


Government could fund Peter Ridd’s fight against Greenie crooks at James Cook University

Quite aside from anything else the issue of legal costs is big  here.  JCU has already spent $630,00 on denying Dr Ridd justice and once they have to pay Ridd's legal costs that will rise to around one million.  And that is cheap compared to what a High Court appeal would cost.  But that is money that should have been used to fund research and teaching.  It is a fundamentally unjust use of taxpayer funds.  The government has a beef with JCU on those grounds alone.

And a High Court appeal would be sheer vindictiveness.  Once they have lost their case in a lower court, the prospect of a win in the High Court is dim.

The government should impose financial penalties if an appeal goes ahead.  It would be a misuse of funds that were allocated for research and teaching.  JCU will probably claim that the money comes out of administrative funds but if such funds were so flush the surplus could still have been diverted into a research grant, which would have been much more in keeping with the purposes of the university.

And what was Dr Ridd's offence, that has brought down so much rage on his head?  He made a cautious and scholarly comment about the validity of some measurements made by his colleagues.  The normal response to such an observation would be to go back and check the validity concerned.  That such a normal scholarly procedure was not folowed suggests that the measurements really were invalid and known to be invalid, implying that the damage to the Great Barrier Reef was  being exaggerated

In my own research career I was very careful about the validity of my measurements and reported it if a measure did not survive a validity check (e.g. here).  That's light years away from the practices at JCU so I congratulate Peter Ridd for raising the issue there


Attorney-General Christian Porter has told Coalition MPs that the Commonwealth could assist in supporting costs for sacked academic Peter Ridd to help him in his legal fight against James Cook University.

The Australian has been informed by multiple sources that Mr Porter left the door open for the Commonwealth to play a role in supporting Dr Ridd in today’s joint party room meeting and identified a scheme which could be used to assist the academic.

The internal discussion in the party room comes as JCU moves to appeal a Federal Court finding that the university’s sacking of the physics professor was unlawful, with several Coalition MPs voicing their concerns in today’s joint party room meeting at the appeal.

Sources told The Australian that Education Minister Dan Tehan told the joint party room meeting that he was concerned by the decision of JCU to appeal the April decision by judge Salvatore Vasta.

Dr Ridd is seeking financial compensation after he was sacked by JCU for publicly criticising the institution and one of its star scientists over claims about the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef.

Liberal MPs told The Australian that Mr Tehan said that he planned to meet with the JCU Vice Chancellor to raise his concerns directly and that Mr Porter viewed the appeal as significant and argued that it had the potential to change the landscape of academic freedom in a fundamental way.

In the party room meeting, Victorian Senator James Paterson asked Mr Porter whether the Commonwealth could do anything to contribute to Dr Ridd’s costs for the appeal, with the Attorney-General giving a loose commitment to see whether there was scope for the federal government to play a role.

This was confirmed by multiple Liberal MPs in the meeting. The Australian has contacted Mr Porter’s office for comment.

The Australian was also told that several Coalition MPs spoke to the issue including Sydney based MP Craig Kelly who initiated the discussion by saying he was concerned at how much money JCU would spend on the appeal.

The Australian has also been informed that George Christensen also said that, while JCU was important to his electorate of Dawson, he was increasingly concerned at the developments in relation to Dr Ridd.

Liberal sources said that North Queensland MP Warren Entsch raised concerns about the impact of the legal dispute on tourism and attitudes towards the Great Barrier Reef.

The Australian was also informed that new Queensland Senator Paul Scarr also criticised the JCU press release on the judgment, describing it as outrageous.

In April, Justice Vasta ruled JCU had erred in its interpretation of a clause in its enterprise agreement and deprived Dr Ridd of his right to express his academic opinion. Within hours of the judgment being released in April, JCU published a statement on its website criticising the ruling.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General told The Australian that Mr Porter had undertaken “to get a brief from his department on whether these are matters relevant to the Commonwealth Public Interest and Test Cases Scheme.”

The spokesman said that this scheme provided “financial assistance for cases of public importance, that settle an uncertain area or question of Commonwealth law, or that resolve a question of Commonwealth law that affects the rights of a disadvantaged section of the public.”

“It is notable that there has been no application to this Scheme in relation to this matter,” he said.

SOURCE 



Adam Goodes documentary sparks breastbeating about race in Australia

Unmentioned below is that it is common for footballers to be booed by supporters of the opposing team.  It has been handed down from on high that such booing is "racist". But lots of white footballers have been heavily booed.  For one or two people race may have had something to do with it but the great majority of it was not racist.  Australia has in general remarkable racial harmony.  We even put up with Middle-Eastern Muslims.

Goodes was a crybaby.  And that REALLY wound up the spectators.  Showing weakness just invites further attack.  His onfield antics were rightly criticized as foolish.

What the wise-heads are ignoring is that Goodes was aggressive, confrontational and a whiner.  He has done a lot to make himself unpopular. He once did some sort of Aboriginal war dance on the football field, complete with an imaginary spear thrown in the direction of the opposing fans --  Not exactly the "mature discussion about the state of race relations in this country" that his Leftist supporters called for.

It got to the point that he just had to run onto the field to get booed.  He made himself an oppositional figure.

Adam Goodes’ documentary in which he addressed routine bullying and racism he faced in Australia while playing in the AFL sparked an outpouring of emotion and support for the former Sydney Swans star.

The Final Quarter aired on Channel 10 on Thursday night and showed the booing and abuse Goodes faced over the last three seasons of his career, eventually driving him into an early retirement.

After hosting a special late-night edition of The Project, Waleed Aly penned an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald where he outlined the justification behind people’s booing of Goodes.

“Critics of Goodes loved to point out that there were more than 70 other Indigenous players in the AFL who weren’t getting booed at the time,” Aly wrote.

“That sort of thing is falsely offered as a defence against the charge of racism because it pretends racism can exist only if the prejudice in question applies to every single member of a race; that if something is not exclusively about skin colour, then race is not a factor at all. But that’s almost never how it works.

“More often, racism lives in the double standards that mean someone gets attacked in a way a white person never would, even if they were to behave in the same way.

“Racism doesn’t require a belief that there are no “good” blacks. In fact, it frequently relies on the “good”, precisely because it wants to identify the “bad” ones.”

After leading the discussion, he capped the night off by thanking those involved in making the film and asked a key question about where we go from here as a nation.

“It seems that what began as personal torment for Adam quickly became a national controversy,” he said.

“The question now really is whether it can become a productive national conversation. And the answer to that question rests with each of us.”

As part of the debate, he explained why there were no indigenous voices in the media representatives appearing on The Project — who discussed how the press handled the issue at the time.

“I deliberately didn’t have an indigenous voice, because I felt that we needed to reflect the media as it was, and that doesn’t include indigenous voices,” he said.

Journalist for The Australian Chip Le Grand told the show that one of the most “disturbing” aspects of the documentary is that it highlights how “a lot of us don’t seem to even know racism when we see it”.

He also said the AFL’s failure to step in and help Goodes was “such a failure of leadership”.

“They just needed someone to clearly stand up, and it was Gill McLachlan’s time, in that instance, to just say: ‘Look, yes, it is complicated but, clearly, race is a part of this, it’s a big part of this, it’s ugly and it has to stop’,” he said.

On Thursday morning on Studio 10, director and award-winning filmmaker, Ian Darling said he wanted “everyone to look at (the documentary) with open eyes and an open heart.”

“Just be prepared to think that maybe we didn’t get it right,” he said. “Literally, every single person I’ve shown it to — from Gill McLachlan at the AFL through to schoolkids — have said ‘Wow, I didn’t understand the extent of the booing’ or ‘I didn’t understand the enormity of the media conversation.’”

SOURCE 


The psychology of Trump hate

The Left routinely pour out anger, hated and contempt towards Republican Presidents. The only near-exception was Ronald Reagan.  He was very hard to hate so they mostly settled on contempt for him.  He actually got all his transformative policies through a Democrat Congress!

And a sentimental Christian gentleman -- George Bush II -- was excoriated as a new Hitler!



But Trump has caused the hate to rise to a new level.  The Left have exploded with hate during his Presidency. Even the tiniest thing Trump says or does is fodder for derogatory mention. The thing that symbolizes the Leftist attitude towards Trump for me is the icecream "affair".  At a small White House dinner for some journalists, Trump asked for an extra scoop of icecream with his dessert.  The media went wild!  How contemptible to ask for an extra scoop of icecream!  Who does he think he is?  Oliver Twist or something?  The triviality of it is mind-blowing.



Much wisdom has been written about Trump hatred but I want to take an analysis of it down to the psychological level. I want to relate it to the basics of the Left-Right polarity. And at its psychological fons et origo the Left Right polarity is very simple.  Conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. Conservatives don't think the world is perfect but they can happily live with it. For Leftists, on the other hand, departures from the ideal burn them up.  So how has Trump affected that?

When you are discontented with something you tend to be angry about it and want to change it. So we have the unending stream of mostly addled Leftist proposals for "reform". What the proposals are varies almost from day to day but there is always that simmering discontent motivating them. The problems at the Southern border, for instance, went from non-existent to a humanitarian disaster almost overnight.

The sad thing is that the Left are mostly up against what philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz pointed out a couple of hundred years ago:  Maybe we live in the best of all possible worlds.  Leibnitz didn't mean that seriously.  He set it as a question that should be asked before we change something. The point being that some bad things are necessary to some good things and vice versa.

Current politics have a rather clear example of that.  It would be good and nice and kind if we could abolish America's borders -- as the Left propose -- and thus give all the poor of Latin America access to a better lifestyle.  How good, kind and noble the Left are to propose such a beneficial change!  The bad thing is that we cannot do that and must have defended borders if America is not to be flooded by people with the attitudes, values  and customs that have made their own countries cesspits of violence and corruption.  America already has plenty of troublesome people within its borders.  The last thing it needs is more of them. Opening the borders (good) would lead to a widespread collapse in civility (bad)

So the Left are usually up against it.  The arrangements that have stood the test of time are pretty much the best we can do.  They are an existing balance that maximizes the good without falling too far into the bad.  So any change will usually disrupt that and cause "unforeseen" bad side effects.

The bad effects are not however really "unforeseen.  Conservatives foresee them regularly and warn Leftists about them.  But the Left are so obsessed with the bad things that they see that they close their ears to any information that might distract them from the "good" that they want to do.  So we have things like the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that made health insurance UNaffordable for many.  Conservatives certainly warned vigorously against it before its enactment and it got not one vote from the Right side of the house.



So the Left are constantly in a state of frustration. The "good" that they try to do almost always rebounds against them and causes them to become unpopular instead of popular -- and loses them votes. Obamacare undoubtedly helped put Trump in office.  Would anybody suddenly hit with $10,000 deductibles vote Democrat?

But the Left have gradually got some of their way over the years,  despite the generally impoverishing effect of their policies. They have, for instance, got America to bow down before the false God of global warming despite the huge and futile cost of windmills, solar panels etc.  Had all that money been spent on repairing and upgrading America's roads, bridges and highways, everybody would have been much better off.

And the Obama/Clinton regime gave them hope of a lot of progress towards their imagined ideal world.  Americans were regulated within an inch of their lives.  The stage was set for the emergence of a new "sustainable" Eden.  Obama had generated much ecstasy and Clinton was clearly committed to continue the march towards that new but elusive Eden where we would all be ants in a great Leftist anthill.  From Hegel on that has been the Leftist vision.

But what they were up against was the wish of many Americans not to be antlike robots obeying every addled command from on high.  The ever-changing enthusiasms of the Left were far from universally shared.  And when Leftists see "racism" under every bed they certainly depart from how most Americans see things.

One thing that has changed little over the years is the Leftist  obsession with race.  Before WWII, they were for the white race, now they are against the white race but they remain racists.  With "affirmative action" and "diversity" it is all about race for them.  Almost comically, however, they deny being racists and constantly accuse everybody else of being racists. They explain their race consciousness as an attempt to do good so, in their simplistic way, any other thinking about racial differences is bad.

And they extend their intolerance of any groupthink other than their own to all sorts of groupthink by others.  In particular they are very wary of patriotism and the idea that America is particularly admirable or exceptional.

Obama put it politely when he said during an April 2009 press conference: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”.  Coming from an American President that is remarkable. Most Americans love their country or are at least proud of it and expect to hear that echoed in the words of their President.  Obama could on occasions bring himself to praise American ideals but praise for America as such was in short supply.



The above picture was from a 2007 political rally where the national anthem was being played. An ABC News video showed that Senator Obama did not salute at any time during the anthem and that everybody else on the platform did.  His ignoring of the anthem was widely criticized so he learned from that and was  more careful when he became President.  But it is clear that his heart was just not in it.

Obama was noted for his politeness but most Leftists are not polite at all about any praise for America.  They call it "racism".  Leftist Howard Zinn's widely used textbook A People's History of the United States is a catalog of America's failings, real, exaggerated and imagined. As America is a famously patriotic country, Leftists do at election times make some pretence of patriotism but the frequency with which they prescribe Zinn's textbook for the schools they control shows what they really think.

It is clear enough why anybody would be careful about racism.  It is "good" to avoid excesses such as Hitler's  -- but extending "racism" to include all forms of group consciousness is egregious.

So by the time of the election that brought Trump to power, many Americans had grown very tired of being lectured to and restricted by the Left.  What to the Left were the first steps towards a new Eden were to many Americans an attempt to make them into something other than what they naturally were -- and they were in a mood to rebel against it.  And in particular they disliked the constant parade of accusations and condemnations about how "deplorable" America and Americans were.

So the election of Trump was to his followers a return to normal -- a return to how they naturally felt and thought.  They simply threw off the ever-tightening Leftist straitjacket that was trying to force them to be something that they were not.  And because of their natural patriotic feelings they LOVED the man who liberated them to express that loudly and proudly again.

So now we can see why the Left hate Trump beyond all bounds. All their attempts to right the wrongs of the world as they see them have always failed. The Soviet attempt took a painfully long time to fail but it too in the end failed.  But through their "long march" through American institutions it had begun to look as if  they might now be building a lasting approach to a new Eden.  And the Obama presidency seemed to be a culmination of that --bringing a clear victory to them at last.  After lifetimes of failures they finally seemed to be getting there. Their dreams were on the brink of being realized.

Then Donald Trump took it all away.  He destroyed their last great hope of permanent "reform". He liberated people to be what they wanted to be rather than what the Left wanted them to be.  And from the moment he became the Republican candidate his vigorous patriotism signalled that.  He was clearly from the world that Leftists deplored. And almost as soon as he came to power he did the unthinkable by removing America's obeisance to global warming -- by withdrawing from the Paris "treaty".  The "treaty" was mostly just an empty gesture but Trump took even that away.

Thanks to the traitorous John McCain, Trump did not manage to get  Obamacare abolished but he broke its backbone by getting the mandatory levy abolished. Obamacare ended up as no triumph anyway, as we see from the way that most of the current crop of Democrat presidential candidates are pushing "Medicare for all".  So there is nothing left for the Left.  What should have been their great triumph lies as a shattered ruin at their feet.

So if someone had destroyed all your dreams just when your dreams seemed likely to be realized, would you not hate with a passion the man who snatched those dreams away?  The Left are great haters so after what he took away from them, they hate Trump with all their  being. Nothing that he does is forgiveable.



Worse than Chernobyl? Radiation in parts of Marshall Islands is far higher, study says

All this fuss about radioactivity is premised on the conventional assumption that any level of radioactivity is bad for you. In fact, only  exceptionally high radiation exposures are dangerous and the exposures in the islands were not measured against that standard.

Take the case of Japanese travelling salesman man Tsutomu Yamaguchi.  He was badly burnt after exposure to the Hiroshima blast during WWII.  So he went home to have his wounds looked after -- to Nagasaki.  So he copped the Nagasaki blast as well. So he died immediately, of course.  He did not.  His burns healed and he lived to 93.


Yamaguchi

What Leftist scientists just will not acknowledge is the reality of hormesis.  Radiation is such a great thing to scare people with that they won't let it go.  Hormesis occurs when exposure to low levels of something dangerous will often strengthen you against higher levels of that thing. And the effects of ionizing radiation are often strongly hormetic. Even medium doses can be protective. 

There is a review article here in an academic journal which finds that hormesis fits the facts much better than the conventional assumptions


Think of the most radioactive landscapes on the planet and the names Chernobyl and Fukushima may come to mind.

Yet research published Monday suggests that parts of the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific, where the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests during the Cold War, should be added to the list.

In a peer-reviewed study, Columbia University researchers report that soil on four isles of the Marshall Islands contains concentrations of nuclear isotopes that greatly exceed those found near the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants. On one isle, those levels are reported to be 1,000 times higher.

All four of the islands are currently uninhabited, and three of the four — Bikini, Enjebi and Runit — are in atolls where nuclear testing took place. But one of the islands, Naen, which measures less than an acre, is in Rongelap Atoll, nearly 100 miles away.

Researchers found concentrations of plutonium-238 on Naen, raising the possibility that the island was used as an unreported dumping ground. Plutonium-238 is a radioisotope associated with nuclear waste and not generally with fallout, said Ivana Nikolic Hughes, a coauthor of the research and an associate professor of chemistry at Columbia.

The only other place the team detected this isotope was at Runit, where the United States entombed nuclear waste from bomb testing under a leaking concrete dome.

“We can’t say for sure that [dumping on Naen] is what happened,” said Nikolic Hughes, who directs Columbia’s K=1 Project — a multidisciplinary program dedicated to educating the public about nuclear technology. “But people should not be living on Rongelap until this is addressed.”

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have reignited debate on the U.S. government monitoring residents’ health in the Marshall Islands and its assurances that locals face little risk from radioactivity.

Some researchers have declared Rongelap safe for re-habitation. But the Columbia study suggests that, for now, people not return to Rongelap or Bikini atolls, where Naen and Bikini are located, until certain areas have been more thoroughly cleaned. More than 600 people have already returned to parts of Enewetak Atoll — where Runit and Enjebi are located.

“We are concerned about what is being consumed on Naen and at what level,” said James Matayoshi, the mayor of Rongelap Atoll. He said he didn’t like the idea of people collecting food from Naen and the islands near it, because he doesn’t know what kind of risk that poses for his constituents’ health.

Others are not so sure the study’s results are valid.

Terry Hamilton, the U.S. Department of Energy’s lead researcher on Marshall Island radiation issues, said although the Columbia team’s approach seemed reasonable given the costs of pursuing such research in a remote part of the world, he was concerned their methodology and equipment could have overestimated the radiation they were detecting.

Both Nikolic Hughes and her husband, Emlyn Hughes, a Columbia University particle physicist and co-director of the K=1 project, rejected claims their methodology was flawed. The intent of their studies, they said, was to provide the Marshallese with an independent assessment — research not considered suspect because it was conducted by a government responsible for the contamination.

“The work provides valuable background information for local policymakers,” said Jan Beyea, a retired radiation physicist who has worked with the National Academy of Sciences but was not involved with the research. He added the results could tip the question of resettlement either way.

“Implicitly, I think these results might caution efforts to return, because of the readings found,” Beyea said. On the other hand, he noted, information that only certain uninhabited islands have levels that exceed agreed-upon safety standards could mean “the return to some places might be made easier.”

More HERE


"Digger"

The term "digger" in Australia is a word for an Australian soldier.  It is a respectful term, originating from an awareness of the hardships of the troops in trench warfare etc.  Our forces have often had to "dig in".

It is one of Australia's nicer customs that the term is frequently used to address frail and elderly men.  If you want or need to say something to a man who looks as if his life is pretty much over, you address him as "Digger" -- as in, "Do you need any help with that, digger?"

Use of the term implies an assumption that although the man may not be good for much now, he served his country honourably in his youth so still deserves respect for that.  It is a respectful form of address.

Australia has been involved in lots of wars -- mostly as allies  of the Americans or the Brits -- so an assumption that an old man was involved in one of them will often not be astray. Nonetheless many of the men addressed as "digger" will not in fact have served in the armed forces --  but the term is used to convey that the man was once much more than he now is.  It is respect for the elderly generally.

I myself normally used the term in addressing elderly men but now  I find that I too am on occasions addressed that way if I get into some sort of a pickle.  At age 76, I am in fact pretty frail these days so I appreciate that respect and the eagerness to help that goes with it.

And I am even one of those who have some claim on the term.  I did reach the rank of sergeant during my time in the Australian army.



Heightism?

I suppose it is regrettable in some ways but sexual attraction is well rooted in our evolutionary past -- and it is unrelenting.

And the reality is that both sexes are very physically oriented.  Men like a woman to have some approximation to an hourglass figure and women want a man who is tall and well-built.  A man of 6' and around 200lb just has to have a nice smile for something like 90% of women to find him attractive. A man only 5' tall  will only be attractive to about 1% of women, most of them fatties.

So our hero below is rightly aggrieved.  But he is fishing in the wrong pool.  He evidently wants an attractive woman. He should be realistic and look for a fatty


The bagel shop customer who left a larger-than-life impression after he went on a rant about being vertically challenged claims he is the 'Martin Luther King' of short people.

Chris Morgan says he's enjoying his newfound notoriety since video of his meltdown at a Long Island, New York, bagel shop went viral.

In a rambling interview with DailyMail.com, Morgan said that he felt pushed to breaking point by discrimination against short people.

The five foot tall 45-year-old, of Long Island, even said he saw himself as a 'prophet' and 'modern day Martin Luther King' for people of his height as he called for equality for smaller men.

'I got to the point where I'd had enough,' he added. 'The girls hate me, they don't like me, that's fine,' he added. Now I have a mission. 'I'm not stopping and the world is going to hear me. I want equality for everybody. '


He does look rather ridiculous amid much taller people

But in the same breath, the divorced cleaning company owner, who has no children, said he resented all women, branding them 'gold diggers' because they kept dumping him 'because of his height.'

He said: 'I'm sick of getting constantly lied to and used on dates. And then they dump me. They tell me I'm too short,' he explained. 'They don't have a job, or a job as good as mine. They don't have a car. They are more overweight... and they are judging ME?

'Whatever happened to the love of the 60s?' he asked. 'When people loved each other for themselves?'

Morgan, who got married in 2007 before getting divorced five years later, clarified that he was 'tired of the immaturity.' And while he was seen in footage being the aggressor, he asserts that he just wants 'justice.'

'I'm just not tolerating this any more,' Morgan declared. 'Some of those girls found it funny. That's why I have resentment towards women. I find them all to be stupid, gold digging liars.'

But he claims that since video of him screaming and ranting about how the world treated 5ft-tall men, that women have been unfathomably throwing themselves at him.

The incident began yesterday at the Bay Shore bagel when Morgan claims the girl behind the counter struggled to understand his order.

'The third time I asked, she smirked with her friends,' he shared. 'She was laughing and talking with her friends, putting her hand over her mouth and laughing, like girls do when they reject me on a date.

Morgan has a history of confrontations, as seen on his YouTube page which is inundated with clips of him getting in fights with gas station employees and mothers. Some videos even contain racist language. Others do show him playing with a bird and fishing.

In one video, Morgan storms into a 7/11 and has a argument with a Pakistani employee who he claims asked how tall he was. He proceeds to scream at the man about how he is from a 'third world country.'

Morgan attempted to get the employee detained by police, but officers refused to file harassment charges.

Shocking video filmed by Diana Reyes, 18, showed the irate customer shouting at staff at Bagel Boss East in Bay Shore, New York, on Wednesday.

Reyes told the DailyMail.com that she and her friend - 19-year-old Olivia Bradley - were waiting in line for their breakfast when the man started mouthing off in front of them to staff.

'He just seemed a little agitated and as soon as the woman turned her head, he started going off,' Reyes said. 'No one provoked him.'

The brief clip shows a woman asking the man why it is OK to 'degrade women.'  The man retorted: 'Why is it OK for women to say "Oh you are 5ft' on dating sites. "You should be dead. That's OK!'

As other patrons point out that no one has said that inside the establishment, the Napoleon-esque man asserts that 'women in general' make the distinction.

The vertically challenged patron then shouted: 'Everywhere I go I get the same fucking smirk with the biting lip.'

A man in the store, who is twice the angry customer's size, tries to get him to calm down.

'Shut your mouth,' he stated. 'You're not god, or my father or my boss.' The little man tells the larger man he isn't scared of him and chest bumps him in an attempt to intimidate him.

But as he continues boasting about his fighting abilities, another man comes and slams him to the ground.

Additional clips show the man storming out of the store as employees try to hand him his bagel.

The 18-year-old also said that the man who tackled the angry customer, immediately letting him get up and walk away.

SOURCE




Waitrose’s package-free shopping is a PR move that will change little

The article in Britain's "Guardian" below  by a cynical Greenie makes some good points.  He is right that popular Greenie strategies are pissing into the wind.   He wants much more radical Greenie "solutions" but knows he will not get them any time soon.  He has some amusing lapses.  He recommends selling avocados in edible coatings.  But who eats the outside of avocados?  Avocados come in an excellent natural packaging of their own

He sees no reason to explain his aversion to plastic packaging.  But there is no obvious reason for it.  The plastic waste that entangles some birds and fish does not come from Britain.  The Brits carefully gather up their waste and make sure it does not go into the sea. The plastic waste that entangles some birds and fish is put there by third-worlders in  Africa and Asia who just chuck their garbage into a nearby river. Without some action about that, anything Brits do is pointless.  It has negligible effect.

He does however touch on one genuine problem.  Reducing plastic packaging increases food waste.  That plastic packaging is there for a purpose.  It increases the shelf-life of the food item and protects it from contamination of various sorts.  Without the packaging the food will go off faster and have to be thrown out.  And people will get more food-borne illnesses.  Is that good?  Greenies tend to get highly critical of food waste but by  reducing packaging they are creating it.  But nobody expects logic from Greenies. Foot-shooting and panic is their forte.



Waitrose’s experiment in packaging-free shopping is an obvious win for the supermarket chain. Its decision to sell around 200 loose lines to shoppers at its Oxford store – they can now use their own containers to take home rice, pasta, lentils, cleaning products – will be catnip (now dispensed in self-service hoppers, presumably?), to ethical shoppers. The move co-opts the trend for “unpackaged” seen in more radical zero-waste shops and the rise of refillable wine and beer (growler-fills in Waitrose!). It ticks some useful, hip boxes for this rather stuffy middle-class brand.

It is all positive PR and puts Waitrose on par with rival supermarkets who, facing predicted “polluter pay” legislation (more on that later), are suddenly super-keen to prove their green packaging credentials. Market-style loose vegetable aisles are being rolled out at Booths; Asda has removed the plastic wrap from its swedes; Morrisons has unsheathed its cucumbers (for part of the year); and both Iceland and Tesco are trialling schemes to pay customers to recycle plastic bottles (5.5bn worth of which are currently burned or dumped annually). Tesco is even experimenting with collecting and recycling “soft plastics” such as crisp packets, which local authorities generally cannot reprocess.

Waitrose is discounting its unpackaged goods too, a bonus for those of us who shop there (full disclosure: me. I go there and to the Co-op because they are at least employee-owned – all caveats fully acknowledged). Behaviourally, Waitrose appears to be pushing at an open door here, too. A decade ago, when the campaigning group, Wrap, looked at consumer attitudes to unpackaged products, it found that hygiene concerns were less important than the public’s disgust about overpackaging. Ninety per cent of us already happily buy loose fruit and vegetables.

But instead of celebrating this change, it feels to me like another of those fashionable supermarket spasms (trials selling misshapen veg; pushes on unfashionable sustainable fish like mackerel), that will ultimately change little. It will achieve traction with an already self-motivated minority, but then what?

Realistically, how practical is unpackaged for most people? Keeping a bag for life handy at all times is difficult enough (and, such are the unintended consequences that can arise, some worry they have actually increased the total amount of bag-plastic in circulation). But imagine the hassle of planning and carting – by car, inevitably – endless (plastic?) containers to Waitrose. For dry goods, wouldn’t providing heavy-duty, reusable and recyclable paper sacks in-store be more user-friendly? And is any of this a truly sustainable model: driving to Waitrose to refill on frozen fruit because we want to eat strawberries in February? If so, where is the scientific audit, the full life-cycle analysis of all those interlocking energy uses, that proves it?

If you want to reduce Britain’s carbon footprint, surely a far more radical overhaul is needed? One that, for instance, evenly distributes big supermarkets (not local and metro spin-offs), so that, using their economies of scale and logistical might, we all have access to affordable food where we live. Enabling us to shop little and often (using refillables, preferably), without driving. That would go hand-in-hand with a generational schools programme teaching people how to plan meals and shop carefully, to minimise food waste.

Investment in sustainable food packaging, such as Apeel Sciences’ edible coating for avocados, is important, too. Removing plastic is great in immediate pollution terms, but if it leads to increased food waste – Morrisons unpackaged cucumbers have a shelf-life of five rather than seven days – many experts would tell you that, in carbon-footprint terms, food waste causes the greater damage.

That lack of joined-up thinking is most glaring in the recycling market itself where local authorities (or the taxpayer) shoulder 90% of the cost of waste recycling in a system so flawed that two-thirds of all our waste plastic is shipped overseas. Instead of being managed nationally for the greater good, the recycling market fluctuates, driving or curtailing innovation haphazardly and leaving huge technological holes in what can be recycled, where. That is why Costa Coffee is subsidising coffee-cup collections, at £70 a tonne, in an attempt to kickstart the market in recycling coffee cups and their problematic plastic linings.

The government, meanwhile, prevaricates. Plans announced in 2018 to make the food industry pay £1bn each year to recycle the waste packaging it creates (currently councils spend £700m annually on recycling, business just £73m), are out for consultation and years from implementation. It is “too little, too slowly”, said Labour MP Mary Creagh, chair of the environmental audit select committee.

SOURCE



First our land, now our WATER: How China is the biggest buyer of Australia's most precious resource

This is a totally crap scare.  The Chinese are NOT picking the water up and taking it to China.  All the water concerned is used in Australia on Australian crops. The scare is being generated out of the fact that Chinese investors now own some Australian farms and some of those farms have water rights

It is in fact mainly about Cubbie Station, Australia's massive cotton grower, which is hugely beneficial to Australian trade.  The drought at one stage sent it broke and it was partly Chinese money that rescued it

Australia's water market should be more closely monitored after it emerged China is the largest foreign stakeholder, experts say.

The Federal Government in March revealed that 10.4 per cent of Australian water rights are owned by foreign individuals or companies.

Chinese investors own 732 gigalitres or 1.89 per cent of the water on the market - an amount more than Sydney Harbour which holds 500 gigalitres.

In close second, Americans own 720 gigalitres (1.86 per cent) while British buyers own 414 gigalitres or 1.1 per cent.

A string of investors from countries including Canada, France and Singapore own 0.5 per cent or less.

The figures were revealed in a new ATO register of foreign ownership which was set up to monitor who owns Australia's most precious natural resource.

But as China flexes its muscles on the global stage and seeks strategic influence across the world, experts say we must keep a close watch.

'A total of 10.4 per cent of our water being owned by foreigners is a significant amount,' Professor Quentin Grafton of the Australian National University told Daily Mail Australia. 'As such, it is important that Australians know who is using our water - it's a public resource and it's critically important to the country.

How does the water market work?

Government appointed bodies decide how much water from rivers can be given out each year. Once it is allocated, users can trade their water. There are two main types of water trade: temporary and permanent.

A temporary transfer is a transfer of water specifically for the irrigation season.

If one farmer does not have enough water for his crops, he can buy water from another.

A permanent transfer is the transfer of the water entitlement. The purchaser buys rights to a yearly allocation of water from a river and receives the allocation until they sell.

The Australian water market is not national but split into different sections within each state. The largest market is the Murray-Darling Basin in the south east.

Professor Grafton said foreign ownership of Australian water is not necessarily problematic.

'Investors are not allowed to export the water so it has to be used in Australia,' he said.

Asked if too much foreign ownership of water could be a problem, Professor Grafton said: 'We'll have to wait and see.'

But federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud said there was nothing to worry about.

'At the moment, there's a small percentage of water owned by foreign interests and much of that is by one property - Cubbie Station,' he said.

The Cubbie Station is a massive Queensland cotton farm largely owned by a Chinese textiles company.

The station's water storage dams stretch for more than 28 kilometres along the Culgoa River in the Murray-Darling basin - and the station can use up to 500,000 megalitres per year.

SOURCE 



The recent rise of nationalism among conservatives

There is here a long article in "the Economist" which offers a passable summary of the history of conservatism and goes on to note that a new mood of nationalism has recently emerged among conservatives in both America and Europe.  And it sees that as a notable and alarming break from conservatism as it was. 

And in the USA, Hungary, Italy  and Poland the new nationalistic conservatism now rules.  Donald Trump of course is the most notable exemplar of the new movement.  With an approval rating among Republicans of around 90%, Trump IS the new conservatism.  Conservative parties are often rather fractured internally but American conservatives are solidly behind Mr Trump. The small remnant of "never Trumpers" are just talking to themselves

The piece however offers no clear explanation for this sudden departure from the "good ol' days" of the past. It treats the new movement as something of a mystery.  But it is no mystery.  You just have to be following world events to see that the new assertion of national pride has one very clear and obvious source -- the invasion of Western countries by large numbers of problem people from the Third World.

For the USA it was an accumulation of an ongoing problem with Hispanics and in Hungary and Poland they saw the influx of Muslim parasites into neighboring Germany and Italy and closed their borders in time to escape most of it. In all cases however, it involved a reassertion of the value of the national culture as better than what the invaders brought with them

Conservatives have always been proud of their country, its culture and their past but they are patient and tolerant people so have been little bothered by constant Leftist nibbling at their culture and demeaning the past achievements of their country.

But it got all too much when a flood of illegal new arrivals came in and were pandered to rather than expelled.  It would not have been so bad if the illegals had been expected to assimilate to the host country but the reverse was the case. The host nation was expected to make various adaptations to fit in with the illegals.  A process of undermining the American culture that had served Americans so well got underway. "Dial one for English" was just a token of what was resented.

The most important elements of culture are not its singing and dancing but the attitudes and customs embodied in its people.  And the very radical policies being promoted by the current rash of Democrat Presidential contenders makes it very clear that the attitudes and customs that made America great are far from secure.  It is now conceivable that America could degenerate into a socialist hellhole. And most Hispanics would vote for such a hellhole. They already do South of the border.

And conservative Americans do not at all like that prospect. Because conservatives tend to be interested in the past, they could see it clearly when the inherited culture was being diluted.  And the culture that the illegal arrivals brought with them was far from admirable. Everybody knows what a mess Mexico and most of Latin America is. Who would want to live amid the crime, corruption and poverty if they had some other option.  Mexicans themselves certainly don't want to.  That's why they come to the peaceful, orderly and prosperous USA.  So there is no reasonable way one can deny that the inherited culture of the USA is superior in its results from the cultures of Latin America.

With their crazy belief that all men are equal, Leftists erupt at any claim that one culture can be superior to another and by constant cries of racism and the like they have stood in the way of American cultural assertiveness.  They have suppressed talk  among Americans to the effect that America's traditional ways of doing things are better than what happens in places like Mexico.

But the Left could keep the lid on the pressure cooker for only so long and in America the lid blew off with the election of Trump -- someone who WAS prepared to call America great and defend its values. The shackles of political correctness were largely and joyously thrown off.

So what has happened is that conservative Americans have reasserted their traditional values over the moronic Leftist insistence that all cultures are equal.  American conservatives have always had pride in the unique phenomenon that is America and they now see that they need to speak up for reality.

And they want more than words. They want action to stop the deterioration of what they hold dear.  And a wall is the action that they most want, a wall to keep the bearers of problem cultures out.


What does Russia want?

I have just read a VERY long-winded article in the NYT which tries to answer the question above.  When people write at such length it generally means that they don't have any clear answers but hope that by covering a lot of ground the answer will be in there somewhere.  And such is certainly true of that article.

The answer has to be at the psychological level and some of the senior Russian officials the reporter interviewed did after a fashion tell the reporter what the answer was -- but she hardly seemed to notice it. 

What Russians generally and also their leadership  want is respect and acceptance that Russia is a great and important country. They are the world's largest country, stretching all the way across the Eurasian continent from the Baltic to the Pacific. And they have over the years made colossal contributions to the arts and sciences.   So when Russia lost control over half of the territory that they had controlled in Soviet times they saw that as a humiliation.

So the Russian leadership tries to restore a sense of pride in their own people and gain the international attention and influence it had in the Soviet era.  They do NOT see themselves as a failed state notable only for attempts at influencing  American Federal elections. 

It should not be forgotten that Russia had worldwide influence in the Soviet era.  It even had great influence and respect in the USA. The Democratic party at that time were shills for the Soviets.  The Donks did all they could to support Russia in any political controversy.  They were among Russia's best friends. 

Mr Putin would like some of that back. But instead he finds his country demonized -- criticized and marginalized on many fronts.  Recovering ethnically Russian territory in the Crimea seems a heroic and historic achievement to Russians but America has renewed the cold war on Russia over it.

Mr Putin has been very restrained over events happening in his own backyard (e.g. the independence struggle in Eastern Ukraine) so it is clear that countries further West have nothing to fear from him. He will however take opportunities that present themselves to get Russia noticed. A more cordial atmosphere between Russia and the USA would make such adventures less likely.  If America can remain friendly to the ghastly Saudis, friendship with Christian Russia should be no strain




Trump is the most open President America has ever had -- by far

Both on Twitter and in most of his speeches to supporters you see and hear exctly what is going through his mind at the time -- no filtering, no censoring, no political, correctness. And you particularly note that he seems to contradict himself sometimes.  He says something, decides it was not quite right and then says a derivative of the original thought that  suits him better.  It is not at all a contradiction, just online editing.  The difference is that he lets you see the whole process of him coming to a statement that he thinks is right.

  He can be a bit hard to follow at times but if you are on his wavelentgth you get his thought well enough.  He is not a policy wonk and is light-years away from having a Churchillian turn of  phrase but he may be the most honest man ever to occupy the oval office.  His ideas and policies are his own and what he really thinks.

Slate are totally contemputuous of his speaking style and have put up some excerpts from a recent speech to his supporters that they think are most contemptible. You can pick at the way he says it but I think he makes his points pretty well.  His comments on his hair gave me a laugh. I reproduce what Slate picks out below.  See if you get what he is saying.  He is focused on censorship by social media:

On the Economy

So I’m thrilled to welcome you here, and we’re all working very hard, and I don’t know if you know but we just had 27,000 on the Dow. That’s the highest in history. We’re up a couple of hundred points today—the highest in history, for those of you that like the stock market.

But the stock market means jobs. I view it as jobs. And I view it as 401Ks. A lot of people say, “Oh, the rich people are getting rich.” But if you look at the numbers, the greatest impact proportionately is blue collar workers, in what’s happened, in this miracle that’s happening.

And people with 401Ks, they’re up 72 percent and 67 percent. And the wife or the husband, whoever is responsible, the other one says, “You’re a genius. You’re a great financial investor. Darling, you’re up 77 percent this year.” So a lot of good things happen. A lot of people are happy, and I think really everybody’s happy. Some people just aren’t willing to admit it. Does that make sense?

Popular in News & Politics

On White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino
We’re delighted to be joined at this summit by someone you know very well, our senior adviser for digital strategy, and somebody that’s been working for me for a long time—for many years—Dan Scavino. Where’s Dan? Stand up, Dan. So, long before we were even doing this, he was at a club. Running a club, and other businesses. And he was okay at doing it. Not the greatest. I wouldn’t say the greatest. But, you know what he was great at? He was always looking at his computer screen. I said, “That guy’s incredible.”

So right at the beginning, I said, “That’s the man.” And there was nobody better at that. And I think Hillary had 28 people, and I had Dan. Right? I had my Dan! And he works about 28 hours a day, and he works very hard. But he doesn’t work. I mean, he loves it. He loves it. And his imagination, and really working with all of you, and many of you. He’ll come up with ideas, and you’ll come up with ideas. And he’ll run into my office, he says, “You got to see this.” And a lot of times I’ll go out, and I’ll spend a lot of money on a concept. I’ll say, “Here’s a concept. Come up with this.” And we’ll hire these companies, and they want a lot of money, and they come back. Just happened the other day, right? I said, “That’s terrible. These guys have no talent.”

The people that have the talent are the people that we deal with. And it’s true, and some of you are extraordinary. I can’t say everybody, but no, but some of you are extraordinary. The crap you think of is unbelievable. Unbelievable.

On the Census Citizenship Question

Can you believe… “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?”

“Sir you can’t ask that question.”

“Why?”

“Because a court said you can’t.”

We have three very unfriendly courts. They fight us all the way. The judges don’t like us too much, I guess. But think of that, Herman, think of that question. “Are you a citizen?” We spend—this is another thing that’s so crazy—$20 billion on a census, $20 billion. They spend $20 billion! I said, “Twenty billion WHAT?” Twenty billion dollars. On a census. They go through houses. They go up. They ring doorbells. They talk to people. How many toilets do they have? How many desks do they have? How many beds? What’s their roof made of? The only thing we can’t ask is, are you a citizen of the United States? Isn’t it the craziest thing? Twenty billion. Pretty amazing.

On What’s Happening

But I’ll tell you, a lot of bad things are happening. I have people come up to me: “Sir, we want to follow you. They don’t let us on.”

And it was so different than it was even six, seven months ago. I was picking up unbelievable amounts of people. And I’m hotter now than I was then, OK? Because you know, you also cool off, right? You do. But I’m much hotter. Especially with a nice, new stock market like it is. Right?

But no. I’m hotter now, and I go to Dan, I say, “Hey, what’s going on here?” It used to take me a short number of days to pick up 100,000 people. I’m not complaining; we’re like at 60-some-odd million. But then we have five different sites. We have another site with 25 million. We have another site with 10 or 12. Then we have Facebook. Then we have Instagram. We have a lot!

We got a lot of people. Way, way over 100 million, but I used to pick them up… And when I say “used to,” I’m talking about a few months ago. I was picking them up, a hundred thousand people every, very short period of time. Now, it’s, I would say, ten times as long. And I notice things happening when I put out something—a good one, that people like, right? Good tweet. It goes up. It used to go up, it would say 7,000, 7,008, 7,000, 7,017, 7,024, 7,032, 7,044. Right?

Now it goes, 7,000, 7,008, 6,998. Then they go, 7,009, 6,074. [Audience boos] I said, “What’s going on?” Now, it never did that before. It goes up, and then they take it down. Then it goes up. I’d never had that. Does anyone know what I’m talking about with this? [Audience screams “yes”] I never had that before. I used to watch it. It’d be like a rocket ship when I put out a beauty. Like when I said, remember I said somebody was spying on me? That thing was like a rocket. I get a call two minutes later: “Did you say that?”

I said, “Yeah, I said that.”

“Well, it’s exploding. It’s exploding.”

I turned out to be right. I turned out to be right. We turned out to be right about a lot of things. But I never had it.

On Setting the News Cycle

I said watch, I’m going to do this. And I said, “We recognize the Golan Heights as being part of Israel.” It was a big thing. I go, watch this: boom! I press it, and within two seconds: “We have breaking news.” John Roberts of Fox was over. He said, “We have breaking news. Please, break it up.” Doesn’t matter what they’re talking about, John does it. He breaks it up.

Now, that’s Twitter. That’s social media. I call Twitter a typewriter. That’s what I really call Twitter, because it goes onto Facebook automatically. And it goes onto Instagram, and it goes on to television—moreso Fox than it does CNN. If it’s something bad, they’ll put it on.

If I have a spelling deal, they will put it on. “Donald Trump spelled the word ‘the’ wrong.” You know? “He doesn’t know how to spell ‘the.’ He spelled it t-h-i.” You know? I couldn’t care… Any kind of a punctuation mistake, they put it on. So I’m very very careful. I, really… I’m actually a good speller, but every once and… The fingers aren’t as good as the brain.

But, but it is true. And it’s incredible what it does. I put out a social media statement, and I was telling Kellyanne the other day. I said, “You know, I used to put out, like, a press release.” Right? And people would pick it up, sort of, you know. The next day, two days, they’d find it sitting on a desk. If I put out… We hardly do press releases anymore, because if I put out on social media, a statement, like I’m going to in a little while on something totally unrelated (but a very important statement—now they’re going crazy, “What is it? Tell me,” but it’s very important), but if I put that out in a press release, I’m telling you, Kevin. People don’t pick it up. It’s me, same. If I put it out on social media, it’s like an explosion. Fox, CNN, crazy MSNBC.

On NBC in General

They’re stone cold crazy. I made them a lot of money with The Apprentice, and I gave them a top show when they were dying on NBC. But they don’t like me too much. They wanted a big extension. They used Arnold Schwarzenegger instead. Big movie star. You know what? He died. He died.

I was there 12… 12 years, 14 seasons, and then they pick a movie actor. And he dies on us.

You know, I own that with Mark Burnett and some people. And I said, they said, “Would you rather have him had been, like, this tremendous massive success? You own it, so you benefit financially. Or would you rather have him die, so that you say you did it for 14 seasons, 12 years.”

I said, “I think I’d rather have him die at it.” That means you don’t need the money. I’d rather have him die at it. Anyway, but with amazing creativity and determination, you’re bypassing the corrupt establishment.

On the Loyalties of Tech Execs

So you know, they’re playing with a lot of minds and they’re playing unfairly. And the funny thing is that, in theory, they shouldn’t be liking the other side. They shouldn’t be liking the other side. They should be really liking our side, because we’re the ones that won freedom. Far more.

You see what’s happening up on the debate stand. You see what they’re doing to each other. You’re seeing the hatred that they have up there, and it’s a very different philosophy. It’s a very different thought.

On Whether There’s a Word Called “Communism”
Because what they’re looking at is pure socialism, or worse than socialism. You know, there’s a word called “communism,” too. There’s a word—they don’t like to use it. Very rarely do you hear that. But there’s a word called “communism,” and they’re trying to get socialism over the line. But these people are… This is beyond socialism, to a large extent. And I think that we’re going to have a tremendous success.

On Types of Weather

We had, on the Mall just the other day, 4th of July, a tremendous success. It was pouring. The weather was just… It was beautiful in one way. They learned it was my real hair that day, because I was drenched. Well, that is the one good thing. I ran, and they learned it’s my hair.

Because I’ve been through every windstorm, sandstorm. Let’s go over here. Let’s go. This one, that one. This desert. Let’s go to this ocean, and get out of the plane, sir. The wind is blowing at about 70 miles an hour. I said, “Boy, it’s gotta be… It’s gotta be mine.”

But, uh, but we’ve seen it all. We’ve seen it all.

On Platform Biases

But we run out of here… Shadow-banned, a hundred percent. You look at what’s going on. You know, I could go… The blocking, just the basic blocking of what we want to get out. The fact that they don’t let them join. They don’t. There was…. There’s no doubt in my mind that I should have millions and millions…

I have millions of people, so many people I wouldn’t believe it. But I know that we’ve been blocked. People come up to me, and they say, “Sir, I can’t, I can’t get you. I can’t follow you. They make it impossible.” These are people that are really good at what they do. They say they make it absolutely impossible. And you know we can’t have it. We’re not going to let it happen.

Josh, we’re not going to let it happen. And you know, if they did it on both sides, if it were done to the other side, to the other group… And I’m representing everybody. I do, I represent everybody. I fully understand liberal. I fully understand Democrat. We want to get along. We want to make sure that everybody loves each other, if that’s possible. And maybe, I really believe it is.

On the Infamous China/Farmer Feud

And you know, the farmers say, “We just want a level playing field, sir.” I love the farmers. They’re patriots. And China, as you know, targeted the farmers, because they think they could get to me by hurting the people that I love and that we take care of. And, it had no impact. I would watch—even on networks that don’t exactly like me—and I’d watch as they interview farmers, and they’d have ten or 12 people sitting. They’d say, “We don’t care. The president’s right. We’ve been ripped off for many years. Somebody has to do… Somebody had to do this.” China made over the last ten years hundreds of billions of dollars, you could say four to five hundred billion dollars a year.

On Having Conversations with Silicon Valley CEOs

So one of the advantages of being president is, when you ask for a meeting, you get it generally. I don’t know. I can’t think of too many I haven’t gotten. And you say, “I’d like to see in the Oval Office…” Or you have somebody call “Oval Office.” I’ve been with all of these people, at the highest level, one-on-one. Just recently with Google, just recently with Twitter, the top. All right? And you talk to them, and you swear, they’re like your best friend. “Oh, sir. No. We believe. We… Freedom of speech. Oh yes. Absolutely.” And we go…

So, it’s very interesting to see that. And and the level of, you know, you look at them… The sincerity! And I say, that’s fantastic. And they’ll leave, and then I’ll realize, three or four weeks later, it’s worse. It actually got worse. Because I say, look, I believe in technology. I believe in free markets. I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in all the things. And, and they are super genius. […]

But I tell you what, technologically, it’s unbelievable what they think up. Even Dan and I, when we sat with you-know-who, at Twitter. Number one. We talked about certain things. He said, “Yeah, well we could do this, this this.” I said, that’s really great. You know, this is incredible stuff. China will admit there’s nobody like these brains. But they’re not using that brilliance and they’re not using what we gave them fairly. And they have to do that.

And we don’t want to stifle anything, we certainly don’t want to stifle free speech, but that’s no longer free speech.

On What Else Doesn’t Count as Free Speech

See, I don’t think that the mainstream media’s free speech, either. Because it’s so crooked. It’s so dishonest. So to me, free speech is not when you see something good, and then you purposely write bad. To me, that’s very dangerous speech, and you become angry at it. But that’s not free speech. Somebody came to my office, I won’t say who, but a very big person. And I said OK, you don’t like the term fake news, which I think I get credit for. But I’m sure, if I said I get credit, they’ll say, “Thirteen years ago somebody came up with a term.”

I think I get credit—I’d be very proud to take it.

But I think I get credit. Now by the way, the worst fakers of all are using fake news. I saw the other day, on CNN—total fakes—I see on CNN, they go, “Fake news media has reported…” No, no, THEY’RE fake news media. They’ve turned it around. They’ve turned it around.

SOURCE