Tag: the West

Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum

It was the very thought that came into my own head the moment I heard this: ‘Reality of our time’: Dutton warns Australians to prepare for war. Of course, my Latin is a bit rusty so the thought occurred to me only in English. However, the more up-to-date and erudite chaps and chapesses at The Spectator were able to go straight to the original.

  • Yesterday, classically-literate defence minister Peter Dutton raised the campaign temperature by saying, ‘Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.’ Actually, that’s what a Roman chap called Publius Flavius Vegetius wrote the best part of 2,000 years ago. Dutton translated it on the Today show as ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’, with reference to Red China knocking on our door through its deal with the prime minister of the Solomon Islands. Meanwhile, our PM talked of ‘red lines’ being crossed if China militarises the Solomons: how the Reds would be thrown back behind that red line, if they crossed it, wasn’t spelled out by the government (nor did Labor spell out what they would do). But you can take it as given that those choices of words were workshopped in Liberal focus groups, and yesterday they set the media agenda.

Whatever and however Scott Morrison may be remembered, it won’t be as “Pig Iron Bob”. Labor will undoubtedly invent some other means to traduce [more Latin] our Prime Minister. This is a more complete version of what Dutton said: Peter Dutton warns of a potential chemical weapon attack and says China ‘would play Penny Wong like a fool’ if she becomes the new foreign minister. If you don’t think this is a very real issue, than think about this.

She [ie Penny Wong] told the Guardian’s Australian Politics Podcast that recent tactics by Scott Morrison to paint Labor as soft on China will only make the situation worse.

The Prime Minister in February branded Labor deputy leader Richard Marles a ‘Manchurian candidate’ after he called for closer defence ties with China on a trip to Beijing in 2019.

Ms Wong said the extraordinary attack to portray the Opposition as weak on national security and a puppet of an enemy power, was an act of ‘desperation by the government’.

‘It is also a trashing of Australia’s national interests because one of the things that makes us strongest is our unity,’ she said.

‘What we won’t do is play domestic politics with the China relationship.’

And what she definitely will not do is indicate that the CCP is a potential threat to Australia. And just what is the CCP?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Labor needs to be more specific about national defence along with border protection.

Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

Shame Henry II had no one to rephrase and explain what the king had meant. Although, as it happens, the American President meant every word of it even if he was supposed to keep it a secret.

As discussed here.

The President of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., who is 79 years old and suffering from senile dementia at the end of a long life of bullying, lying, boasting, conniving, grifting, grafting, and living off the public tit to an extent indecent even by Washington standards, declared war on Russia on Friday. In the course of a typically blustering, hectoring speech, the senescent Biden went off script and interpolated the following peroration: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”…

During his long occupation of a Senate seat, Biden served for many years on the foreign-relations committee, and learned all the wrong lessons without acquiring an ounce of real-world savvy. This is the problem with electing a lifelong senator to the presidency with no prior executive experience except ribbon-cutting ceremonies and attending foreign funerals as veep. Senators’ words have no real-world consequences; presidents’ do. Senators can say anything they want, because their words carry no executive authority and they cannot be legally held accountable for them. They’re meant for the ears of voters back home, not for the guy in the Kremlin with his finger on the button.

And just what button is that?

The problem is that the current president  of the United States is no longer disciplined by anyone, although those who are in charge are keeping everything as closely under control as possible. Biden himself is as illegitimate as it is possible to be since the evidence that he was fraudulently installed into office becomes more undeniable with each passing day, not that the media will fail to deny anything amiss, and will never report how the election was stolen. 

Meanwhile, just as The Spectator asks, “will Biden’s talent for f***-ups lead to World War III?”, the big issue in the US continues to be the almost certainly fake and premeditated incident at the Academy Awards. This really was the front page on the largest selling newspaper in America’s largest city.

The United States is no longer a serious country and we are in great danger the more we rely solely on American protection.

Let me finally mention this: China-Solomons pact is a disaster for Australian security in the South Pacific along with this China will keep purchasing Russian oil and this Joe Biden Eliminates U.S. Tariffs on More than 350 China-Made Products. Plus, of course, this: Chuck Grassley Reveals Financial Links Between the Chinese Communist Party and Hunter and James Biden on Senate Floor — And Brings the Receipts. 

Five years is a very short time in foreign relations.

Mad, bad and dangerous to vote for

Came across two very similar articles on the net with almost identical titles and with sentiments very close to my own. First this: “We Live in a Time of Utter Madness and We’re Ruled by Lawless Monsters”. If you would like to see who was saying what, please go to the link.

And then there was this: The Sheer Madness of Today’s Left. This one is by Victor Davis Hanson, and this is part of what he writes.

When the rock of green and woke ideology hits the hard place of reality, sheer madness always results.

The world prices of oil and natural gas are skyrocketing. At the time of a major war in Ukraine, the Western democracies have framed the conflict as existential, with a Russia/Mordor on the attack against a declining West/Gondor.

 

A subtext of the struggle is that the world’s illiberal regimes—fossil-fuel exporting Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and the various Middle Eastern autocracies—are getting richer by the day while destroying Mother Earth, as noble gas and oil importing green Western nations can scarcely afford to drive or heat their homes.

And this is how the article ends:

Yet madness is predictable when the unchecked left-wing’s demand for limitless and endless power collides with a hated, but unremorseful ideological agenda utterly divorced from reality. Put simply, when ideologues demand power but cannot maintain it politically because they are cruel ideologues that destroy what they touch, expect more of their insanity to follow.

For the bits in the middle, you can go to the link, on the off chance you have not yourself recognised how mad the left is and how much worse they lately seem to have become.

Might add this one in since it seems to be based on a similar theme: Joe Biden’s Big Gaffe Perfectly Exposes the Imbecility of the ‘Experts’. Being an imbecile is similar to being mad. Go to the link for more. Here’s the final line:

People with no real skin in the game pushing their costs onto others around the world, while showing not even a semblance of strategic thinking. That’s not morality. It’s imbecility.

 

In The Ukraine there are apparently two sides to the story

I went looking for an analysis that would provide something like the Russian perspective on the events in The Ukraine, and by coincidence the video was sent to me at the very same time. The vid is from 2015 but once you watch this bit of history many bits fall into place. This is the notes that come with the vid:

The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis

John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, assesses the causes of the present Ukraine crisis, the best way to end it, and its consequences for all of the main actors. A key assumption is that in order to come up with the optimum plan for ending the crisis, it is essential to know what caused the crisis. Regarding the all-important question of causes, the key issue is whether Russia or the West bears primary responsibility.

And again I emphasise that the vid is from 2015 in a discussion of an earlier conflict in the same area with the same two sides involved. The first twenty minutes of the video provides a pretty good summary. 

I also went looking for something on my own and went to DuckDuckGo, but the news reports that it has gone google seem to be true. Virtually everything was from some Western “news” source, which to me meant that you cannot rely on a word they write. Eventually I found this: What Russia Wants In Ukraine from The American Conservative whose tagline is this:

Russia’s position has been remarkably consistent for nearly three decades, especially when compared to the West’s.

We are just spectators here, but if we are going to have a nuclear war, might as well understand why.

 

 

 

Unprecedented ignorance

My own sentiments exactly: The era of unprecedented ignorance. Not only that, but it’s from a source that is least expected: Matthew Bach who is the Victorian Shadow Attorney-General and Shadow Minister for Child Protection and Youth Justice.

I recommend it all, but let me provide you with a few bits near the start before you go to the link.

First, we had a global pandemic. Then we had to deal with the devastating impacts of harsh health restrictions designed – we were told – to protect us. Instead, they resulted in a mental health crisis, years of lost learning for our kids, and the crushing of small businesses.

In my home state of Victoria, the situation is even worse.

The number of people awaiting vital surgery could fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and newly leaked documents show numerous Victorians have recently died waiting for their 000 call to be answered. Cost-of-living pressures are hitting families hard as the price of fuel and food sky-rockets, but the Andrews Labor Government continues to raise taxes to fund its massive infrastructure blowouts: $24 billion since coming to office.

As if to top it all off, we have a full-scale war threatening in Eastern Europe with the potential to reorganise the international order for the worse.

At every step of the way over the last two years, our leaders have been at pains to tell us how unprepared they are for these crises. The Covid pandemic was ‘unprecedented’ – we’ve heard it a thousand times. Now, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is ‘unthinkable’ – the word is repeated again and again in television news bulletins, on social media, and in print.

And yet, few things have more precedents throughout history than plagues and wars.

Go to the link and read it all.

The causes of inflation go well beyond growth in the supply of money

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There was a time that even economists understood that the story of inflation went well beyond increases in the stock of money. But Keynesian theory, with its Y=C+I+G, is now so embedded across the mindset of everyone as a means to make economies grow, and not just amongst economists but there as well, that the bizarre rates of growth in public spending in the US is seen as normal and generally appropriate. In reality, it is not just the cause of inflation but will create vast pockets of poverty as well.

Saw the chart at Powerline with the heading about class dismissed. There was at least this one comment so that someone else does see the deeper nature of the problem.

If an economist tells you modern monetary theory works, that person is NOT an economist. Run.

We are on the edge of a precipice in so many ways that it is hard to see how we will survive the next five years.

LET ME ALSO ADD THIS:

Came across a couple of additional posts that seem to add to the issue. First from Instapundit.

“I know there’s a lot going on in the world today, but can we just take a moment to reflect on how crazy it is that the United States House of Representatives just passed a $1.5 TRILLION spending bill that no one has read?”

And then from the comments there was this.

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Of course, nothing can be confirmed until it is officially denied.

We have stepped into the political unknown

How can fascism be explained? - Quora

Fascism is the amalgam of the corporate state with totalitarian political structures. Communism pretended it was international. Fascism is socialism within a single country. 

We seem to live in our own version of that time in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. I have tried to find something that matches my own views on what has just taken place and this is the closest I could find but there is nothing close enough. This is Kremlin Invades Ukraine from FrontPageMag with this as the subhead: “How Biden’s policies fueled Russian aggression”. Listening to Biden’s response is beyond weak and incompetent. The American left seems complicit in all of this to the fullest extent possible. 

Also found this take from Instapundit illuminating in its own sad way.

LIKE TRUDEAU (AND PELOSI), PUTIN PRETENDS ALL HIS OPPONENTS ARE NAZIS: Zelensky to Putin: I’m no Nazi — I’m Jewish.

Where things will be a year from now is anyone’s guess. 

 

“A tiny minority with unacceptable views”

There is some resistance growing to the insanities associated with Covid across the world, with the Canadian truck convoys leading the pack. It’s not even that they are anti-vaxxine as such, just anti being forced to take the vaxxines and then each of the mandated “boosters” to participate in normal life, like going to the shops, sitting in a cafe or taking in a movie.

The Great Reset means that the nitwits who we have inadvertently installed as political leaders, or the complete nincompoops who have had one success in setting up Facebook or Twitter are now to be our leaders in perpetuity.

Is there actually anyone in public life stupider than Daniel Andrews? Perhaps the Premier of Queensland. Or the chaps who run WA or the NT.

We are ruining our lives for a mild disease that if you find you have it, the protocol is to stay home for a week.

The tiny minority with unacceptable views was the nonsense statement about the truckers from the Canadian Prime Minister whose greatest previous accomplishment are found listed here.

These are the people who are the tiny minority with unacceptable views. 

“This once thriving liberal democracy”

If this is the best American members of Congress can do, they really should just keep their views to themselves: US Republicans call for sanctions against Australia over police treatment of protesters. There you find:

Along with this:

The group, which is chaired by former Republican Congressman Kerry Bentivolio, shared the article on Twitter and called Australia’s actions “contemptible,” adding, “We should expect better from one of our closest allies.”

They cannot distinguish between our national government and the governments of our individual states, who in relation to Covid are laws unto themselves. Why don’t they go poking their ignorant noses into what is going on in Canada?

It’s not that what is going on within our State system should not be condemned, but that is what should be condemned.

Guest Post: Twostix – May you live in interesting times

Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden, Xie Huan, c. 1437

Reading twitter, the media and professional class are absolutely shitting themselves at the sight of the working class organising and thousands of strong backed men marching. It’s all sneering “disgusted” and lots of nervous revulsion about “thugs”.

They instinctively know that their class’s protector: this ugly new paramilitary police force, isn’t nearly strong enough to hold this back if it goes further. A paper tiger. It is structurally weak because it is the manifestation, the perfectly Continue reading “Guest Post: Twostix – May you live in interesting times”