Five Australian PMs, fractured political parties: tribal politics loses its flavour. By Troy Bramston.

Only 55 per cent of Australians under the age of 30 support democracy over authoritarian forms of government.

There are five key trends that help define and explain the 2010s: leadership instability; party dealignment; the impact of social media; the change in traditional activism; and the degeneration of the political class. …

Labor’s vote is in decline:

The 2010s saw four general elections: 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019. Labor did not win a majority of seats at any of them. Labor has won a major­ity of seats at only one election (2007) in the past 26 years. This is an appalling record. If Labor were a business, it would be in receivership.

The party’s primary vote registered 37.9 per cent (2010), 33.3 per cent (2013), 34.7 per cent (2016) and 33.3 per cent (2019) — a decline of 4.6 percentage points across the decade. Labor’s vote needs to be in the 39-40 per cent range to form ­majority government. Labor won with 43.3 per cent in 2007, 49.4 per cent in 1983 and 49.5 per cent in 1972. It is a long time since Labor got anywhere near this level of support. …

Labor has suffered a dealignment of voter support as non-tertiary-educated working-class voters have shifted to the Coalition and far-right parties such as One Nation, while inner-city progressive voters motivated by post-materialist concerns have shifted to the Greens. …

It will be difficult for Anthony Albanese, the most left-wing Labor leader in more than a half-century, to bridge this divide. …

Labor is struggling to reconcile its different constituencies: socially conservative working and middle-class suburban and regional voters with a wealthy progressive cohort of voters in the inner cities. The political divide in the next decade will be as much about culture and values as it is about specific policies. Labor, already breaking away from its historic moorings, will find the next decade more difficult.

Social media:

Radio transformed politics in the 1930s and 40s, TV transformed politics in the 60s and 70s, and the internet trans­formed politics in the 90s and 2000s. The defining technological change in the 2010s was social media. No politician can succeed without engaging voters via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. ..

Much political campaigning takes place on handheld devices away from the scrutiny of the media and most voters. Messages, often fake, are highly targeted. (Remember Labor’s “death tax” or the Coalition’s plan to privatise Medicare?) Divisions are exploited. Political debate is dumbed down. …

The political class:

The political class has continued to degenerate. Those MPs who have not worked as a political staff member, party or union official, or as a lawyer are few and far between. Labor has degenerated the most and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of sub-faction leaders and union secretaries with diminishing real-world authority.

The membership of political parties continues to decline and constitutes less than 1 per cent of the electorate. …

Labor has shifted leftward and the Liberal Party has shifted to the right. Populism, while not as prevalent as overseas, is evident on the fringes of the major parties and is the stock-in-trade for minor parties. …

The influence and authority of the public service has tumbled. It is now challenged by competing sources of advice, including the inexorable rise in political staffers. Public servants rarely offer, or are asked for, frank and fearless advice. The bureaucracy’s ­effectiveness has been sapped by cost-cutting, efficiency dividends and many bright young people preferring a more lucrative and rewarding career in the private sector.

Increasingly the country is run by ideological politicians, the Twitter mob, and a dumbing-down deep state. Too many of those in positions of influence believe a set of PC fantasies and persecute anyone who disagrees, but the money flows to the fantasists. Perfect.

‘They lie to you’: Trump previously held private meetings with Navy SEALs to candidly discuss Afghanistan war, by David Choi.

Months after taking office in 2017 and hoping to get a better understanding of America’s longest war, President Donald Trump began taking meetings with enlisted US service members who deployed to Afghanistan.

“I want to sit down with some enlisted guys that have been there,” Trump told advisers, according to the national security journalist Peter Bergen’s latest book, “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.”

“I don’t want any generals in here. I don’t want any officers,” Trump added, according to Bergen’s book, which was sourced from dozens of interviews with current and former White House officials and military officers. “I just want enlisted guys.” …

Among the first Afghanistan veterans said to have talked to Trump were US Navy SEALs who spoke critically of the war.

“It’s unwinnable. NATO’s a joke. Nobody knows what they’re doing,” the SEALs said to Trump, according to Bergen’s book. “We don’t fight to win. The morale is terrible. It’s totally corrupt.” …

The new details surrounding Trump’s conversation with the SEALs also come days after an extensive Washington Post investigation found that senior US officials had long publicly mischaracterized the war. …

“The officials in the government are awful people. They lie to you,” the SEALs reportedly told Trump. …

Trump also compared the senior military leaders to a consultant for a Manhattan restaurant from the late 1980s. Instead of heeding the advice of the consultant, who merely suggested expanding a kitchen for renovations, Trump reportedly argued it would have been more prudent, and cheaper, to solicit the advice of waiters from a restaurant.

A different kind of President.

Trump Fan Opens ‘MAGA Store’ in Michigan, by Amy Fur.

A man in Plainfield Township, Michigan, recently opened a store to sell Trump-themed merchandise to his community.

Gary Middleton opened the MAGA Store two weeks before Christmas and said that since then, business has been nonstop, according to MLive.com.

“Business is awesome,” he commented. “I didn’t expect this sort of response so quickly.” …

“The response has been overwhelmingly positive. It really has been,” he told Fox 17.

“A lot of great people come in and talk, tell their stories, we’ve had people come as far as Indiana. They love it, they are glad that somebody has the courage I guess we should say to open up a store like that.”

There were never any Democrat stores for Obama, Clinton, etc. They have the media on side, so there is no niche to fill.

San Francisco Dogs Begin Bagging People Poop, by the Babylon Bee.

The dogs of San Francisco have announced a citywide cleanup initiative, in which the canines will carry little plastic bags with them wherever they go in order to clean up the massive dumps humans keep leaving on the sidewalk.

The initiative is expected to freshen up the city significantly, ridding the sidewalk of millions of pounds of human waste. …

The dogs have begun putting signs up around the city reading things like, “Please Pick Up After Your Owner” and “If Your Human Poops, You Scoop.”

Where California leads, the US then the world follows.

Conservatives Need Not Apply for Prestigious Scholarships, by Christian Schneider.

Last week, the Rhodes Foundation announced its 32 American scholarship recipients. The third paragraph of the statement accompanying the selections reveals the foundation’s true goals:

“For the third consecutive year, the class overall is majority-minority, and approximately half are first-generation Americans. One is the first transgender woman elected to a Rhodes Scholarship; two other Scholars-elect are non-binary.” …

Once the ultimate academic award for American students, the Rhodes Scholarship has morphed into an identity contest, where racial and sexual classifications appear to have trumped academic rigor. …

Hitting the jackpot of intersectionality

Drop dead, non-left:

The Foundation claims to reward “character, commitment to others and to the common good,” but those characteristics apparently apply only to progressives publicly dedicated to social-justice causes.

Of the 32 scholars chosen for 2020, only 13 fail to list involvement with progressive causes on their résumés. Of those 13, none lists interest in or experience with a conservative cause — they have chosen to present themselves as politically neutral. (Most of these “neutral” students are involved in the physical sciences, where there is no liberal or conservative way of curing leukemia.)

In other words, students on the left feel free to assert their progressivism, while students on the right know that if they want a scholarship, they better keep their politics a secret. …

This bias is well established in the case of other prestigious academic awards for American students. In 2018, not one of the 59 winners of the $30,000 Truman Scholarship reported being involved with Republican or conservative politics in any way, while 64 percent of winners espoused traditionally liberal causes.

Nudge politics. Reward one side, but not the other, and pretty soon you get what you paid for. Two previous examples with far reaching consequences spring to mind.

• Starting in the 1950s, governments and banks only funded PhDs in economics at universities that supported Keynesian economics. Lucrative and prestigious government consulting jobs only went to PhDs in Keynesian economics. By the 1970s, President Nixon famously exclaimed that “We are all Keynesian now!”, and all universities had gone Keynesian. However, before 1930 Keynesian economics was considered crackpot. It was a doctrine that greatly favors banks and builds government power at the expense of the private economy. It just doesn’t work other than in the very short term.
• Climate scientists who boost the high-sensitivity theory of carbon dioxide get rewarded with money, junkets, promotions, and sometimes even rock star status. The ones who stubbornly stuck to the evidence were sidelined or sacked, starved of funds, and shunned. Even so, the 97% is still an exaggeration! But give it time.

This is how the modern bureaucratic state buys the consensus it wants (with your tax dollars). Students now know to be PC.

A Fundamental Contradiction that Dooms the Left, by Edward Ring.

The fate of all humanity, not just that of America, depends on debunking these two fundamental premises of the Left, both of which are easily contradicted by facts.

The American Left relies upon two moral imperatives to attract supporters and demonize their opponents: saving the planet and fighting racism.

In both cases, however, the Left’s chosen policy solutions stand in opposition to well-established facts. Moreover, these facts that doom leftist policies to failure are not subtle. They don’t require convoluted explanations. Anyone with common sense may grasp them, which is why the Left must rely on deplatforming and cancel culture. It is why they must accuse their critics of being “deniers” and “racists.” They cannot argue the facts. …

Contradiction: Demand Racial Quotas Without Requiring Equal Standards.

The United States over the past 50 years has engaged in one of the most radical demographic transitions ever experienced by a nation at peace. In 1965, when mass Third World immigration began under the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, the percentage of Americans self-described as white was 84 percent. As of 2015, America’s white population had declined to 62 percent.

But that is only half the story. The most common age of a white American in 2018 was 58, whereas the most common age for Asians was 29, African Americans, 27, and Hispanics, 11. In 2014, for the first time, racial and ethnic minority babies became the statistical majority of U.S. children under 1 year of age.

Also beginning in 1965 was the laudable passage of civil rights legislation designed to eliminate racism in America. But over time, these laws went beyond demanding a color-blind society to demanding affirmative action to ensure that minorities are proportionally represented in all American institutions, from academia to corporations and even to the arts and sciences.

When “minorities” constituted 15 percent of America’s population, enforcing proportional participation in literally everything may have been a crude way to combat racial discrimination, but the consequences were limited. But when the “minority” becomes the majority, the consequences will be far-reaching.

Can America’s research universities, corporate labs, government bureaucracies, public utilities, military and law enforcement, etc., operate at maximum efficiency if all personnel at all levels have to display proportional representation of all ethnic groups?

The Left’s remedy to racism in America — to the extent it even still exists — is to enforce these ethnic quotas in all American institutions. But this ignores the indisputable fact that there are significant differences in average academic aptitude between ethnic groups.

One of the most objective measurements of scholastic aptitude is the SAT test administered to high school seniors. Scores on this test are highly correlated to future success in college and lifetime earnings. Average SAT scores differ sharply among ethnic groups. In 2018, for example, the average SAT score differed among ethnic groups as follows: Asians, 1223; whites, 1123; Latinos, 990; blacks, 946.

The bare minimum SAT score required to get into MIT is 1500. In 2018, that score was achieved by 7 percent of Asians, 2 percent of whites, and less than 1 percent of blacks and Latinos. To cite a more mainstream example, a score of 1250 is considered the bare minimum to get into UCLA. In 2018, that score was achieved by 46 percent of Asians, 23 percent of whites, 9 percent of Latinos, and 5 percent of blacks.

The implications of these facts are discomforting, and any solution is controversial. But the Left thinks the solution is to exclude more highly qualified people and blame all disparities on racism. Not only does this result in America’s institutions being staffed by less-qualified people, but it also foments justifiable resentment among those excluded, and equally justified insecurity among those preferred. …

It’s all about money and good jobs for the left. No government is too big, when government jobs go to lefties.

If the Left claims “colorblind” and “meritocracy” are “code words,” don’t just tell them to shut up. Expose their true agenda. For decades, they have spread a message of victimhood so they could keep people dependent, staff their government assistance bureaucracies, and, more recently, replace teachers in colleges and universities with grossly overpaid “diversity, inclusion, and equity” administrators.

The Truth On Asylum And Immigration, by Karl Denninger.

[The US] so-called “stock market miracle”, including specifically firms such as Apple, Nike and others, exist only because we took basically all of the jobs that could be done by people with IQs below 100 and exported them where the labor was cheaper.

This is why NAFTA was signed — to allow making trucks that sell for $50,000 in the US in Mexico, where labor was $3/hour. Mexico’s population has an average IQ about 10 points below that of America.

You don’t need a high IQ to assemble a car coming down a line so if you can hire someone to do that job for $3/hour in Mexico but it would cost $25+/hour here in America, the choice is obvious. The labor cost disparity is so great that the cost of shipping the parts to Mexico and the truck back to America is far less than the labor cost difference.

Oh by the way, if you wish to try to tell me that the 89 IQ (average) Mexican can screw together a car as well as can the 100 IQ German, well, no he can’t. Proof of this is found in the VW TDI Jettas from the early 2000s; the sedans were all assembled in Mexico while the wagons were all assembled in Wolfsburg. The vehicles are otherwise identical. 10+ years later nearly all of the wagons that hadn’t been wrecked were still running perfectly well and everything worked in them. My daughter now owns the one I bought straight off the boat — it has well north of 200,000 miles on it and — surprise — is still running well. The Mexican-assembled cars, despite having the same parts in them, have had myriad electrical and mechanical problems. Do the automakers [care]? No, since the vehicle will get out of warranty before it goes to crap, at which point they stop caring. Therefore the $3/hr Mexican Labor is “acceptable” even though it is materially inferior.

Mercedes being built in Austria, 2009

There are some vehicle plants remaining in the United States. But most of the manufacturing jobs that used to be here, including essentially all of them related to textile and clothing production, were offshored.

Can you manage to run a Starbucks coffee machine and the register with an IQ of 90? Yes. But can you do so competently with an IQ of 75? No. …

There are very close to zero jobs in the American economy today that are suitable for persons with an IQ under 85. That’s by choice — we have enabled and in fact empowered through tax and regulatory policy the offshoring of virtually all such lower-wage and ability jobs, leaving only those that cannot be offshored (such as picking strawberries). …

The US military has learned from bitter experience not to enlist people with IQs below 85. This excludes about 16% of the white population, but half of the black population.

Japan does not allow much if any immigration for this reason; their average IQ is 105 and there are only three nations on the planet with higher average scores — South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. …

[The Japanese] recognize that intellectual firepower is an essential thing, and to allow those who are less-able to compete intellectually into their nation not only leads to a likely public charge problem it directly harms the nation’s competitiveness on the world stage.

Painful truths so resolutely denied by the PC crowd.

Michael Moore: “White People Are Not Good People…You Should Be Afraid of White People”. By Paul Joseph Watson.

During an interview on the ‘Useful Idiot’ podcast, Moore said that people should cross the street if they see three white men approaching them because at least two voted for Trump.

“Two-thirds of all white guys voted for Trump. That means anytime you see three white guys walking at you, down the street toward you, two of them voted for Trump. You need to move over to the other sidewalk because these are not good people that are walking toward you. You should be afraid of them,” Moore warned. …

Perhaps Moore might want to check FBI homicide statistics and then revisit his statement.

Half of the murders in the US last year were committed by black men, much the same as every year, despite blacks only being about 12% of the US population.

This is by no means the first time that the rotund film maker has collectively demonized an entire group of people based on their skin color.

Last year, he called on “angry white American guys” to “give it up” because they are demographically doomed.

Back in January 2018, he asserted that America needed to be “cleansed” of its white privilege.

He also previously celebrated the fact that that white men are “dying out” because America “will be a better country.” …

Now he’s part of the Democratic elite, he denigrates and insults [the white working class] every chance he gets.

And he says we’re the racists. And what a profound misuse of statistics for demagoguery.

He’s worth $50m and owns nine houses. He didn’t get all that by telling the truth.

Report Hyped by Climate Alarmists Warned of Million of Deaths, Nuclear War, Sunken Major Cities by 2020, by Paul Joseph Watson.

“Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters,” reported left-wing newspaper the Guardian on February 22, 2004.

“A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020 [because of the shutdown of the Gulf Stream]. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world,” the report added.

The alarmist document went on to claim that nations would resort to using nuclear weapons to protect dwindling food supplies, a situation that would “bring the planet to the edge of anarchy.”

The authors of the report, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, also asserted that “By 2020 ‘catastrophic’ shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war,” causing widespread “crop failure” and “famine.”

Should be an interesting year.

Climate Change to make Boxing Day cricket extinct. ABC and Monash make history extinct. By Joanne Nova.

It’s a taxpayer funded bonfire: The billion dollar ABC does cut-n-paste “journalism” from the largely taxpayer funded Monash Uni, which wrote a one-sided, badly researched piece as advertising for The Australian Conservation Foundation. Not only have Australians played cricket in 42 degree heat a thousand times before, but on days when the sun was obscured by smoke from bushfires. It’s all easy to find history from 150 years ago recorded on official sites and searchable for anyone with “the internet”.

No hard questions asked — the only question that matters is “how does this help Big Government?”

Extreme heat due to climate change could send cricket’s Boxing Day Test into extinction, researchers say. By Richard Willingham and Joseph Dunstan, ABC, News

The Boxing Day Test may need to be moved to November or March in the future to avoid extreme heat, which is a danger to players and cricket fans, a new report has suggested. …

Two minutes of actual research that the ABC didn’t do:

Over 150 years ago people played cricket in Melbourne at 42C and in partial darkness due to smoke from bushfires. Here’s a man in 1912 remembering a match he went to as a child Jan 14th 1862. It may have been even hotter than that. The BOM offical records say it was 44C. But hey, it’s not like we pay the ABC to phone the BOM and ask them…

Then there was the time players had to abandon cricket due to heat, when it was 45C in Albury in 1939 and the town ran out of ice. Forget the hype, “conditions were not the best, and the “players generally stood manfully up to the heat” — unlike modern snowflakes at Monash Uni and millenials at the ABC.