Niece, grandniece of slain notorious Iranian Gen. Soleimani arrested by ICE while enjoying lavish lifestyles in LA

Niece, grandniece of slain notorious Iranian Gen. Soleimani arrested by ICE while enjoying lavish lifestyles in LA. By US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

Until recently, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter were green card holders living lavishly in the United States.

Afshar is the niece of deceased Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. She is also an outspoken supporter of the Iranian regime who celebrated attacks on Americans and referred to our country as the “Great Satan.”

This week, I terminated both Afshar and her daughter’s legal status and they are now in ICE custody, pending removal from the United States.

Slain Iranian mastermind  Gen. Qasem Soleimani

His niece in LA

His grandniece in LA

Shane Galvin at The NY Post:

The niece of slain Iranian terror mastermind Gen. Qasem Soleimani — who showcased her luxe LA lifestyle on Instagram while bashing the US as the “Great Satan” — and her daughter have been arrested by ICE agents, the State Department announced Saturday. …

Afshar, 47, entered the US in 2015 on a tourist visa, was granted asylum in 2019 and secured a green card in 2021 from the Biden administration. She made at least four trips back to Iran since receiving her green card, the Department of Homeland Security said. …

Hosseniy, 25, also entered the US in 2015 on a student visa. She became a green card holder in 2023. Her online persona was at odds with the Shia Islam her mother espoused.

Fugitive Caesar:

From the Arabic, Iranian, and Muslim perspective this is a huge propaganda coup for the American government. These photos completely discredit Iran, at a moment when Iranian soldiers are deserting and demoralized.

Skely:

Modern warfare is wild.

America will be at war with your country and the generals grand daughter will be doing coke at Coachella over the weekend.

Wi-Fi and leaky brains

Wi-Fi and leaky brains. By Robert Kennedy Jr. via Goku on Joe Rogan.

Robert Kennedy Jr. just revealed that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer. …

 

 

The tumors are glioblastomas — one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer. Kennedy says they always appear on the same side of the head where the patient held their phone.

But cancer isn’t even the worst effect. Kennedy says Wi-Fi radiation opens up the blood-brain barrier, allowing every toxin already in your body to cross into brain tissue:

• Glyphosate from food
• Microplastics from water
• Flame retardants from furniture

Researchers who published these findings called it “leaky brain.”

The US government responded by suppressing the research and shutting down funding. Kennedy says tens of thousands of studies document the danger.

Russia developed Wi-Fi radiation as a weapon. Russian schools ban cell phones. Their allowed radiation levels are a tiny fraction of what the US permits.

Kennedy sued the FCC over this. The court sided with him.

His recommendations:

  • Never sleep with your phone nearby
  • Never hold your phone against your head
  • Never carry your phone in a breast pocket

Related: Tesla activate in-cabin radar pointed at passengers.

Tesla activated its in-cabin radar for 2022 model-year Model Y units and later via a software update in February 2025, a feature officially named the “First-Row Cabin Sensing Update.” The radar, a 60-64 GHz millimeter-wave sensor located above the passenger dome light or rearview mirror, detects passenger presence, size, and movement to enable dynamic airbag deployment and accurate occupancy detection, replacing older seat sensors.

While the initial rollout focused on front-row passengers in the Model Y, Tesla plans to expand the technology to rear-seat detection. The radar can sense heartbeats and breathing to send owner notifications, activate HVAC, and call emergency services if a child is left behind.

The RADAR will be emitting microwave radiation within the cabin, right next to your head. … The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted Tesla a waiver, allowing it to run at power levels higher than typically allowed.

 


More:

A Tesla Model S Plaid has 46 antennas.

— LTE cellular: 700-2600 MHz, 2×2 MIMO, always on
— WiFi: 2.4 + 5 GHz, dual band
— Bluetooth: 2.4 GHz, always scanning for your phone key
— UWB ultra-wideband: 6-8 GHz, phone-as-key
— GPS: 1.2-1.6 GHz
— Satellite radio: 2.3 GHz
— Cabin RADAR: 60-64 GHz

LTE, Bluetooth and cabin RADAR are essentially ALWAYS transmitting. …

Based on animal studies measuring only THERMAL effects for less than 1 hour. no non-thermal biological effects considered. no study has EVER examined chronic simultaneous exposure to ELF + LTE + WiFi + Bluetooth + 60 GHz mmWave + UWB in a sealed metal cabin. …

In 2021, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled the FCC’s refusal to update these limits was “arbitrary and capricious.” they still haven’t changed them. …

You’re sitting in a metal box with 40+ antennas, a millimeter-wave RADAR pointed at your chest and AC magnetic fields from a battery pack under your seat pulling hundreds of kilowatts during charging. And the safety standard says it’s fine because your skin didn’t get warm.

 

 

People have been using mobile/cell phones for two decades and we aren’t all dropping dead from brain tumors, so the risk isn’t massive. But wi-fi could be slowly eroding our health, and we wouldn’t necessarily be connecting that to wi-fi just yet.

In our office we’ve always used wired computers, mice and keyboards. No wifi, minimize Bluetooth. Why take the chance? Our cars are too old for the electronic systems, reporting back to base, touchscreens, etc. (we like our cars, and Waze on a phone can do navigation).

New battery technology will upend everything soon

New battery technology will upend everything soon. By Jared Lynch in The Australian.

A small Finnish technology company, Donut Lab, claims to have perfected a new battery that has the potential to completely upend the electric vehicle industry, promising charging within minutes and practically infinite cycles. …

Donut Lab asserts that it has cracked the “holy grail” of power technology, developing a commercially ready, all-solid-state battery capable of charging to full in just minutes and engineered for a lifespan of up to 50 years.

It sounds too good to be true. But Brian Craighead — chief executive of Australian energy storage firm Energy Renaissance, whose defence arm is currently engaged with Donut Lab’s defence spin-off, ESOX Group — likened the technology’s development to what appeared to be the sudden onslaught of artificial intelligence.

“AI was coming for 30 years. Solid state is the same thing,” Mr Craighead said.

“It’s been two minutes away for years. So somebody is definitely going to crack it.” …

 

 

Mr Craighead estimates that if the cycle claims are correct, the cells could power a vehicle for 50 years and “drive millions of kilometres”. The same long-life economics extends to the residential market, where home batteries could also last five decades.

This longevity, combined with the new unit’s low cost, presents a seismic challenge to global battery makers and, according to Mr Craighead, will make internal combustion engines look ridiculous.

Donut Lab’s solid-state unit is claimed to be a lower-cost option than existing lithium-ion batteries, and the technology is projected to drive overall battery prices down to approximately one-tenth of current rates.

But is it true? Daniel Cooper at EnGadget isn’t so sure:

If real, such a device would change the face of the world, which is why plenty of people don’t think it is. And, as the company makes more effort to demonstrate it is telling the truth, the more holes people are finding to poke their fingers into. So, what the hell is going on with Donut Lab’s battery? After many weeks of research, I’m throwing my hands in the air, tired of the endless dog and pony show the company is putting on.

The electric dream is compelling, because we can do nearly anything with electricity. It’s so flexible, and we can control and apply it much much better than other forms of energy. But the Achilles heel of electric use has been poor storage. Chemical batteries are dangerous and heavy, with only a very modest energy density. Today’s EVs would be great cars, except for the batteries. The new battery technology will change that (though it won’t solve the energy density problem as much as we’d like, probably not enough for most aircraft).

If Donut’s battery technology is what they claim, expect a world in ten years of electric everything, powered by nuclear power via the grid (with fusion to come soon after, yes there are things in the works), with battery storage for portability. Only aircraft will be better powered by hydrocarbons. And yes, “renewable” sources of electricity (which aren’t really renewable — who every heard of solar panels or wind turbines that reproduce or last forever?) are weak and will have niche roles, but their numbers will dwindle due to the pollution and waste they create.

The Senate Inquiry of 2015 into Fuel Security

The Senate Inquiry of 2015 into Fuel Security. By David Archibald.

Australia is in the invidious position of having a Prime Minister and a Leader of the Opposition who, when they were Transport Minister and Energy Minister respectively, did their best to scuttle fuel security for Australia. They can’t be taken seriously on the subject.

Who can lead us out of this vale of tears1? It won’t be One Nation. Pauline Hanson has said that One Nation doesn’t do policy; they prefer to just pass judgement on the efforts of others. Developing policy requires work and you might be criticised. And it won’t be the Labor Party or Liberal Party; global warming hysteria and keeping the lights on are mutually exclusive.

In the last 50 years there has been only one Federal politician who was serious about fuel security. He was a Democratic Labor Party senator for Victoria, who did a deal and got the numbers to start a Senate inquiry into fuel security. …

What is worth recycling are some graphics from submission No 33, which was my contribution to the inquiry….

 

 

Petrol has 80% of the energy content of diesel and so, all things being equal, diesel should be priced 25% higher. …

[Australia could] continue exporting good coal and convert our super-abundance of low-grade coal. … Rocks will burn in pure oxygen down to a carbon content of 10%, which opens up a lot of potential. For example, the Nifty copper deposit in Western Australia is hosted by a Proterozoic shale with a grey colour due to its carbon content. Vast swathes of the West Australian desert would have similar rocks at surface. There is the potential for it all to be dug up, put through a gasifier with pure oxygen. …

Meanwhile, the globalists believe the carbon dioxide theory of global warming and went electric before battery technology was up to it:

On the subject of self-delusion in support of the narrative, the following photograph was taken at a mine site in Western Australia, likely one of the Fortescue iron ore mines:

 

 

It is an electric bus being recharged by a diesel generator. This setup would use at least 30% more diesel than a diesel bus by itself. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: You can’t reason a man out of his self-delusion when his grift depends upon him not understanding reality.

Carbon/climate delusion is like petty crime or abandoning shopping trolleys on the street. Society is worse off by indulging those who partake in it.

Welcome to the age of total hate

Welcome to the age of total hate. By Valerie Stivers at UnHerd.

The Left wants to blame President Trump and his supporters for the debacles of this day, or week, or decade — Iran foremost, but we can take our pick. And the Right, which is starting to wonder about its man, still wants to blame the Left for being such dimwits as to make Trump necessary.

But instead, we should blame ourselves. Donald Trump is only in a limited sense an individual; in a wider one, he is an expression of the total-hatred politics that has been ascendent in America and across much of the world since the early aughts.

He is us, an equal creation of the Left and the Right, and our leaders will all be Trumps from now on — unless we do something. Gavin Newsom, the democratic frontrunner for 2028 has explicitly styled himself after Trump. And a new crop of politicians from Republican James Fishback in Flordia to Democrat Kat Abughazaleh in Chicago have adopted his divisive, confrontation-all-the-time style. …

When government was smaller and handed out less money, politics didn’t used to generate hatred:

Prior to this point, at least in the United States, politics had been the business of politicians and a niche interest among wonks and lobbyists. To the extent that anyone got angry at their friends over dinner over the issues of the day, it was a foible. We lambasted our presidents — Reagan was an evil representative of wealth and greed, Clinton a liar with bad morals, George W. legendarily stupid. But personally, passionately, hating them, and delegitimizing them through the intensity of our hatred, that was still in its infancy. …

Total hatred, on the Left, is the belief that our political opponents are not just people with reasonable disagreements about how to achieve the common good, or different beliefs about what the common good should be — but that they are, personally, bad people, who want something bad, and their leaders are really bad people.

To demonstrate your hatred of these bad people, in the most explicit and grotesque terms possible, becomes the highest good. You #Resist, nevermind that you’re resisting the results of a free and fair election in your own country.

Trump Derangement Syndrome, of course, is the flower of total-hatred politics; as is cancel culture, and the split between Twitter and Bluesky, and all the broken families and broken friendships that have come in the wake of polarization. The arts have fallen victim, with satire and rage becoming the dominant mode of production. … Performances demeaning the American president — he’s a giant inflatable toddler, wearing a crown! — have become so routine that even The New York Times is bored. …

Threaten the left team’s money and power?

Democrats turned the mainstream media into organs of overt activism, discriminated based on race, passed off a vegetative president, and engaged in frivolous impeachments. …

The emotional manifestation of total hatred is an urge toward murder and death, as we can see on social media, where calls for people to die have become their own form of parody. Trump should die. Netanyahu should die. … And of course, people are actually killing each other or trying to: Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, three people in an Austin bar on Sunday.

The political manifestation is what we have today: a politics that is increasingly incoherent, illiberal, and anti-democratic, and which makes no effort to fulfill its core function of negotiating a shared settlement. When the Democrats are in power, they illegally throw open the borders. When the Republicans take their place, they pursue the legitimate end of deporting people by cruel means. …

Cultural control allows the left to think they are on God’s payroll:

The moral high produced by winning the Cold War has been long-lasting.

  • Star Trek: The Next Generation, a deeply influential and treacly good television show about exporting liberal democracy to the entire galaxy aired from 1987 to 1994.
  • The West Wing, a similar idealization of the liberal project, ran from 1999 to 2006.
  • The Wire, from 2002 to 2008, a deeply influential show that formed the moral architecture of most of today’s educated Left, was a grittier version of the same good-versus-evil narrative.

These shows … [all offer] different flavors of the same virtue. A virtue that criticizes America, to be sure, but in the deep grounding of each human soul, a prideful, crusading one, that tells us we’re the good guys.

This has rendered us [well, actually just the left and their institutions] unable to face reality and grapple with opposition. If Evil Russia has interests in Ukraine, we erase them. If Muslim theocrats wouldn’t actually be nice people to live with, and that contradicts our tolerant self-image, we deny it (Queers for Palestine, folks. Hands off Iran). If people in our own country aren’t totally with the program, we bully them into submission. And it’s that slippery spot where we can’t see our own pride that has shifted the political ground from reason to emotion, and from negotiation to sheer rage. …

Our Christian heritage was abandoned:

The older, more rigorous Judeo-Christian values … caution against pride, and promote self-sacrifice, and don’t ever allow us to view the other as all-bad. Without this kind of tempering, we get total virtue, and its corollary, total hatred. …

Given the state of world and domestic affairs, it would be impossible not to be angry; everyone is angry. But the first step towards healing the body politic and ourselves would be to consider that a vice.

The left only totally hate because they use big government — their big government — to get undeserved income and good government jobs. Follow the money.

What’s RFK up to now?

What’s RFK up to now? By Nicholas Hulscher.

RFK JR: “A compliant child must take between 69 and 92 vaccines to stay in school in some states, and NOT ONE of them has been safety tested in a pre-licensing placebo-controlled trial.”

“That is just MALPRACTICE.”

“The people who are in charge of that are now gone.”

 

 

60+ vaccines, none of which have been placebo tested? Scandalous! Effectively mandatory? Outrageous and immoral.

Which modern party would Hitler join?

Which modern party would Hitler join? By Sir Lefty Farr-Wright.

He was also a National 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 (he believed in an all-powerful State), but please don’t remind Leftists about this as for some reason they find this very upsetting.

On the left-right spectrum with collectivism up the left end and individualism and private property at the right end, Hitler was up the left end, just not quite as far left as the communists.

Human rights and respect for individuals in Nazi Germany? Of course not. It was all identity politics and an authoritarian state taking what it wanted.

How many Aussies are rotting in jail for words?

How many Aussies are rotting in jail for words? By The Noticer.

Political prisoner Joel Davis is met by friends as he walks out of Sydney’s Long Bay jail after more than four months on remand for a Telegram post.

 

Joel Davis was released on bail yesterday, after spending 133 days in solitary confinement for words he allegedly posted online, that no one is alleging resulted in any real world harm.

Fortunately for Joel, he has thousands of highly motivated friends and supporters worldwide, some with massive platforms in the US and Europe, and was therefore able to crowdfund enough money to pay for a great legal team, and his profile guaranteed media attention.

But even so, it took Joel more than four months, tens of thousands of dollars, and four bail applications before he was let out under extremely strict conditions.

Speech crime:

The police and prosecutors [argued that] Joel should stay in jail until the trial to protect the “emotional safety” of the public and his alleged victims.

They spent weeks going through every personal and group chat message he has ever sent to find the worst jokes and comments possible in order to lay those charges and to paint him as a dangerous and violent extremist. Lots of alleged words, but no evidence of violent acts, or violence resulting from his words. …

They wanted the judge to keep Joel behind bars for a minor charge 93.5% of people spend no time in prison for, knowing he could be there for two years in isolation with sporadic showers and no exercise …

We are all becoming so desensitised to police state multiculturalism, pre-crime arrests and jail for “hate speech” that it bears repeating – they are trying their best to jail Joel Davis for five years for words. Words on a screen that are not alleged to have caused any violence or harm. Murderers get lighter sentences all the time.

How many lower-profile cases are there that we don’t hear about?

Joel’s treatment at the hands of the system raises another question — how many more Australians are currently in jail for similar offences, potentially for even longer, because they don’t have the same level of support and the same profile as Joel?

The Australian Federal Police has publicly announced the arrests of a couple of dozen men for similar “carriage service” offences — mainly for alleged threats against MPs made online — and for “violent extremist material” offences, which means people allegedly caught with videos of terror attacks or terrorist groups, and terrorist propaganda videos or books. None of these alleged offences, that we know of, have been alleged to have resulted in any real world harm either. …

The corporate media has little interest in defending people accused of these crimes or hearing their side of the story, and they only give Joel attention to try to demonise him and his associates, shame the mother of his newborn baby, and/or call for more and harsher speech crimes, which the left-wing activist journalist class overwhelmingly support.

Prejudiced treatment from the system:

Most of the men facing these charges, it is safe to assume, are relying on Legal Aid or lower end lawyers, and are therefore at the mercy of biased magistrates and local courts, and we all saw how that went for Joel.

Aboriginals get special lawyers who are dedicated to keeping their clients out of jail because of the colour of their skin, but White people get no such defenders, and how many social justice warrior Legal Aid lawyers are going to fight hard against a magistrate they have to deal with every day to get an “extremist” out on bail?

One of Joel’s Legal Aid lawyers was obese and unkempt, turned up late with his shoelaces untied, and made no effort to get his client granted bail. No one batted an eyelid. Some magistrates felt the need to virtue signal at length in the courtroom, and wax lyrical about how awful Joel’s alleged words were, not bothering to hide their personal feelings despite being under media scrutiny.

If it wasn’t for the money Joel’s supporters raised for a top barrister to take his case to a higher court, he’d still be locked up. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’s a public-facing political activist, which they are also trying to use against him in court, no one would know he was locked up in the first place. …

Shut up, peasant:

The system is working in the opposite way to how most people think it should, but if we complain about the system or what it does we risk being jailed for “breaching social cohesion” or “undermining democracy”.

The Victorian Attorney-General’s lawyers told Jacob Hersant’s Nazi salute appeal last year that his implied right to freedom of political communication under the Constitution should be overridden by the rights of minorities not to be offended, essentially saying to Australians: “We have imported millions of immigrants against your will, but now that they are here you have to surrender your political rights”.

Her representatives argued, without evidence, that “hate speech” makes minorities scared to vote, and therefore any form of political communication that offends minorities should be illegal — a true tyranny of the minority. He who is most offended gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to say. That’s democracy in “modern Australia”.

This is police state multiculturalism, a term coined, ironically, by Joel Davis himself.

But Islam? Give those guys a total pass:

A male workforce? How revolutionary.

A male workforce? How revolutionary. By White Baby Factory (!!). This gets today’s award for maximum anti-wokeness.

There are a lot of social advantages that would come from having an all male workforce, with all women being dedicated to taking care of their homes and families.

Young children would all be raised by their mothers instead of having to go to daycare.

Grandmothers would be much more available to help with the grandkids because they’d have no job/career obligations taking up their time and attention.

The risk of infidelity would be much lower because men would always be surrounded by other men while at work, and housewives would be surrounded by other women in their neighborhood while the men are away at work.

Businesses would likely run much more efficiently because men are more geared towards competition, meritocracy, and accepting blunt criticism.

There’d be much less need for HR departments – men wouldn’t have to worry about getting accused of sexual harassment by coworkers or tiptoeing around women’s feelings.

With an all male workforce nobody would be able to get promoted based on their sex appeal or by “sleeping their way to the top”.

With the labor force being reduced in size (since women all left the workforce) men’s wages/salaries would be higher and it would be much easier for families to live off of one income.

Instead of meeting romantic partners through college or work, you’d likely be introduced through family members.

Fathers would have good relationships with other men through work, and could introduce good potential husbands to their daughters.

Mothers would have good relationships with other housewives and would know their children well, and could introduce good young women to their sons.

This would help young women avoid relationships with irresponsible men, and would help young men avoid relationships with women who aren’t good wife material.

 

 

Surely unrelated:

The Red Sox simply posted a video of Boston in 1950, and it’s immediately one of the most radicalizing things you’ve ever seen

 

 

Just so you don’t suspect that we at The Wentworth Report aren’t fashionably woke, lets issue a corrective from the wife of the next president of the USA:

Gavin Newsom’s wife on how she raises her kids:

“I’ve given our boys dolls…if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the ‘he’ to a ‘she.’”

 

And speaking of Newsom, who better to illustrate the flip side of woke and what motivates the modern left:

I’m not a blackpiller but the web of corruption that extends between the Democratic Party, the public sector, NGOs, and various connected cronies is worse than anyone can imagine.

We’re probably talking about hundreds of billions $ stolen nationally each year.

Christopher Rufo:

California is a cash machine. The state collects some of the country’s highest income, business, and fuel taxes, and now spends more than $300 billion per year. And yet, everywhere you look, California seems to be falling apart.

The roads are crumbling. Mismanaged wildfires have turned neighborhoods into ash. Drug addiction and homelessness have metastasized, turning parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco into no-go zones. And the cost-of-living crisis is pricing middle-class taxpayers out of basic necessities like groceries and gas, even as the state spends billions on welfare programs that never seem to lift anyone out of poverty.

Californians are beginning to ask: Where is all this money going? On paper, it funds hospitals, universities, schools, prisons, infrastructure, and other public services. But beneath the surface, something else is happening that California Governor Gavin Newsom does not want you to see: massive, systematic, brazen fraud. …

From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.

Welcome to Gavin Newsom’s empire of fraud.

How the Exodus created a new kind of political order that forged the foundations of Western freedom

How the Exodus created a new kind of political order that forged the foundations of Western freedom. By Henry Ergas in The Australian.

The flight of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt … [has] shaped the Western tradition itself and, through it, the democratic inheritance Australia received with British settlement.

That inheritance is now increasingly fragile. Understanding the ideas that underpin our liberty is therefore more crucial than ever. The Exodus narrative is, at its core, the story of how they entered our world.

If the ultimate power is God, then Earthly rulers must behave themselves and government is by the consent of the governed:

What happened at Sinai was not merely a religious revelation. It was the founding moment of a new kind of political order. When the children of Israel stood at the foot of the mountain, they did not receive a code imposed by a conqueror or a law decreed by a king. They entered into a covenant.

The Hebrew word — berit — describes a binding, bilateral, conditional commitment between God and the people, in which obligations run in both directions. God committed himself to Israel; Israel committed itself to God’s law. The community the covenant created rested not on conquest but consent.

Nothing like this existed in the ancient world. The great empires — Egypt, Assyria, Babylon — understood power as flowing downward from a god-king whose authority was absolute.

The Exodus inverted this logic entirely. The God of Israel had heard the cry of slaves and taken their side against the greatest empire on Earth.

Power was no longer self-justifying. Those who wielded it were answerable for its use.

The covenant at Sinai added something more far-reaching still: that even the highest authority was bound by commitments it had made. A ruler who broke the covenant — who governed in his own interest rather than his subjects’ — forfeited the claim to their obedience. …

English and European freedom broke the age-old pattern of a mass of slaves and serfs ruled over by a ruling class with an army and a clergy:

For centuries after the fall of Rome, the Exodus’s political implications lay dormant, confined to the small, harshly persecuted Jewish community. It took the Protestant Reformation to recover the Exodus narrative as a political text.…

Calvin’s followers drew conclusions he never dared articulate. They fused the Exodus covenant with older constitutional traditions to argue that a ruler who violated his covenant obligations could be resisted and deposed.

The greatest English voice in this tradition was John Milton. Writing in 1644, he cast England itself as a new Israel — a covenanted people called to bring freedom to the world. If England was the “nation chosen before any other”, it was surely so that “out of her, as out of Sion, should be sounded forth the trumpet of reformation”.

The consequences for the British constitutional tradition were momentous. Magna Carta, sealed in 1215, had played almost no constitutional role for centuries. Then suddenly, between 1581 and 1616, it burst on to the scene, championed by often Puritan lawyers who saw no distinction between freedom of conscience and freedom from arbitrary power. …

Law was not the command of the sovereign; it was the accumulated wisdom of the community, binding even on kings because it preceded any act of regal will. And the common law was its embodiment and glory.

The Puritan settlers who crossed the Atlantic carried that covenantal vision with them. They saw themselves as a new Israel, their journey an Exodus, the ocean the Red Sea. John Winthrop, addressing his fellow passengers aboard the Arbella in 1630, invoked the Exodus in urging them to discard the corruptions they were leaving behind …

On Sinai’s foundations Britain forged the rule of law; the United States infused it with the spirit of democracy.

Contrast that with Islam, which took the other route:

Set against that tradition, the Exodus’s Islamic reception is striking. Moses is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Koran, appearing 136 times, far more than Mohammed himself. Yet Exodus’s significance follows a logic diametrically opposed to its reception in Judaism and post-Reformation Christianity.

In Judaism, the Exodus is the founding event of a people; in Protestantism, it became the template for constitutional liberty. In Islam, by contrast, it serves primarily as a prefiguration of Mohammed’s superior prophethood, before which even Moses recedes.

The result is that the covenant has never possessed, in Islamic political thought, the explosive emancipatory power it acquired in the West. Instead, authority flows downward from God, not upward from a consenting community.

Brilliant 19th-century Islamic reformers — Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, the Young Ottomans — and their liberal successors tried to derive a Koranic basis for constitutional government. Al-Afghani himself lamented that Muslim thought had fallen into taqlid — blind deference to inherited authority.

But they were working against the grain. Their tradition had no Reformation recovery of the Sinai covenant, no Puritan-common law alliance, no Mayflower Compact. Precarious and institutionally unrooted, the constitutionalism they promoted collapsed under the onslaught of secular authoritarianism on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other.

The example of Islam makes plain that what is at stake is not antiquarian curiosity. It is the survival of a distinctly Western political inheritance whose foundations we have largely forgotten –- and that is under assault.

The West and Islam are opposites. They cannot coexist in one political entity, despite what the multiculturalists claim. Fortunately we have a solution — different countries for different people, where everyone can do it in their own fashion, in peace. Unfortunately, the left in the West has invited Islam into our countries.

The ancient Greeks were right: the antonym for truth is forgetfulness. When it triumphs, truth dies. The truth being lost is this: the Exodus did not merely inspire institutions. It shaped a way of thinking about power — that authority is conditional, that it must answer to law and that citizens are not mere subjects but participants, with rights and duties, sharing a community of tradition and destiny.

Australia was self-sufficient in oil and petrol in 2000, but is 90% dependent today. Can we drill now?

Australia was self-sufficient in oil and petrol in 2000, but is 90% dependent today. Can we drill now? By Graham Lloyd in The Australian.

Since 2000 Australia’s liquid fuel equation has flipped. We have gone from being self-sufficient in oil and petrol, with eight refineries supplying 98 per cent of consumption, to having two refineries and a reliance on imports for roughly 90 per cent of our fuel needs.

Across the same two-decade period, the US has achieved the reverse …

Two Gulf wars and the ingenuity of a wildcat driller, George Mitchell, transformed the US from being dependent on the Middle East for crude oil to being the world’s biggest producer and an energy export superpower. The transformation is due to Mitchell’s discovery in 1997 of how to drill wells horizontally and liberate oil and gas held deep underground in rock formations. …

It can be argued that … Australia has performed its own feat of energy self-harm. Exploration for oil has been allowed to falter and production of liquid fuels has been sent offshore by a combination of economies of scale, lack of investment and strict environmental mandates from government.

In Australia, climate change has become the crisis that drives energy policy. But, as the war in Iran has shown, energy security is about a lot more than phasing out coal-fired power stations to make electricity.

Australia runs on diesel fuel. Fossil fuels produce the fertilisers we need to grow our food and export crops. Fossil fuels make plastics that are ubiquitous to construction and modern life. Diesel-powered cranes unload containers at the wharves and diesel-powered machinery mines the coal and iron ore we export and fuels the trucks that keep our supermarket shelves stocked. …

We must decide if we want to re-establish domestic energy security or remain dependent on extended import supply lines at a time of global upheaval and potential conflict.

Facing up to reality:

The failure of the last best chance to replace the dwindling oil reserves from Bass Strait can be traced to another crisis: BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater crisis gave environment groups the leverage they needed to campaign against BP’s ambitions to drill for oil in the deep waters off the Great Australian Bight. …

[BP’s] oil spill modelling showed a Deepwater Horizon-style spill in the bight could take more than six months to control, would be certain to hit land and would spread oil for thousands of kilometres. If a spill happened there was a “high probability” it would affect important marine species, including sperm whales and pygmy blue whales.

After BP pulled out, Norwegian energy giant Equinor was given permission to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight but it also pulled out in February 2020, citing poor project economics. Equinor said the project did not stack up financially with other global energy projects. This is despite estimates that more than nine billion barrels of oil could be extracted from several fields, making it — despite the much deeper waters — the logical replacement for dwindling reserves in Bass Strait.

The discovery of oil in Bass Strait in the Gippsland Basin off Victoria in 1965 by Esso and BHP fundamentally changed the nation by delivering energy self-sufficiency. More than five billion barrels of oil have been produced from Bass Strait across five decades but production has been in steady decline since peaking in the 1980s.

Drill baby drill:

According to Geoscience Australia, the Northern Carnarvon Basin in Western Australia is Australia’s most prolific oil-producing region, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of the country’s remaining identified crude oil resources. …

There is renewed interest in Queensland’s Surat and Bowen basins, where the Taroom Trough has been identified as a “new oil frontier”, with major exploration and appraisal drilling under way. …

But, as in the US, shale oil could be our big untapped potential. The Beetaloo Basin is a massive, highly prospective shale gas field in the Northern Territory that is transitioning from exploration to commercial production, with first gas sales to the NT domestic market targeted for mid to late 2026. Several key wells in the Beetaloo Basin have confirmed the presence of liquid hydrocarbons with estimates of hundreds of millions of barrels.

The same is true for the Canning Basin in Western Australia.

The question is whether Australia still has the institutional and political wherewithal to drill baby drill.

I could tell a royal commission into the climate models where the problems are and how they overestimate warming due to carbon dioxide by a factor of about five. Vastly cheaper than wasting trillions on bad energy policy and polluting the environment with wind turbines, solar farms, and transmission lines.

Iran war tidbits

Iran war tidbits. A collection of interesting items the mainstream press mostly ignores.

By the way, the hypothesis that Trump is going slow and is using the situation as leverage to get the Europeans to improve their navies and yield to Trump over several naval issues (e.g. Greenland) seems to be on course so far.

Stephen Hou:

It turns out the whole Iran conflict is a loyalty test for the Europeans and everybody failed.

Commenter:

Europe did NOT fail the loyalty test.

They demonstrated conclusively that they are not at all loyal to the US. Or each other. Or their ancestors. Or their children.

Flat White in The Spectator.

What we are seeing is a frustrated superpower that has been carrying the weight of responsibility for global stability since the second world war. European nations, in particular, have used the money they should have assigned to defence to gold-plate their bureaucracy.

Not only did European nations waste their money and shirk their defence responsibilities, they opened the gates of the West to the third-world. As Trump has warned, nations such as the UK are at risk of becoming Islamic outposts with nuclear weapons.

Trump might be fighting a war (arguably an inevitable one), but the so-called ‘non-interventionalist’ champagne socialists of Europe have been diligently working toward the destruction of the Enlightenment. This has, in turn, put even more pressure on America to hold back China on its own.

Khalid Umar:

The riddle I’ll never be able to solve:

How did the UK, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia collectively decide that confronting the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, soon-to-be nuclear Ayatollah, sitting astride the global energy chokepoint, is simply “not their war”?

How did the memory, experience, philosophy and logic of a millennium of Western civilisation simply vanish?

Is TDS really that deadly a mental disease?

No it’s not a mental disease, but an economic strategy. Join the globalist team and plunder the West’s treasuries for good jobs and fraudulent funds. Trump threatens the whole big-government-NGO-fraud complex that enriches the TDS team.

Stephen Green at PJ Media:

Shipping and military expert John Konrad spent all day in D.C. on Tuesday talking to his military sources and concluded that “the Navy appears to be in no rush to reopen the strait,” even while Iran dictates whose oil tankers are allowed to pass.

“What is this administration trying to leverage?” Konrad wondered, and that nobody he talked to was willing to discuss the fate of Hormuz “until European politicians and media stop calling Americans war criminals and monsters.”

While Konrad admitted he has “no idea” when Hormuz will reopen, “but if the price is a modicum of cooperation and respect for everything America has done for decades to keep Europe safe, the strait could stay closed for months, or turned into a toll booth for years, because the majority of Americans…. and the vast majority of Trump administration officials I’ve talked with… seem fed up with their arrogance.” …

The harsh truth is that Hormuz is their priority, not ours, and yet they refuse to make any serious contribution to the war effort.

The U.S. is a net exporter of oil and liquified natural gas (LNG), and we buy hardly anything from the Gulf. Closing the Strait of Hormuz is an inconvenience for us (in the price of gas and diesel) and hardly a strategic necessity. In both military and economic terms, Hormuz is way down our target list. Complicating the decision matrix even further, re-opening Hormuz at this stage likely requires ground troops — so it’s simply smarter for us to continue the bombing campaign and see if we can’t wait out an increasingly split and brittle regime that might still collapse under pressure.

Europe, of course, doesn’t see things the way we do. Europe believes that their needs must be our priority, and that, furthermore, we’re required to do their job for them. …

Meanwhile, Europe’s contribution to the actual military effort is barely minuscule, and a handful of nations, including France (duh), Spain (fricken commies), and even Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, have closed their airbases to our military traffic headed to the Gulf. Apparently, “lead, follow, or get out of the way” isn’t a part of Europe’s lexicon.

So Trump’s message to Europe, more implied than explicit for once, is this: If you need the Strait of Hormuz opened, come and open it yourself. … Or at the very least, maybe stop closing your airbases to our military aircraft, you sniveling, presumptuous, Euro-weasels.

American Debunk:

When Trump tells the UK to “go to the Strait and just TAKE IT,” the surface read is that he’s venting at allies who didn’t show up.

But the deeper move is priming the the public (and world) with a new mental frame: the Strait of Hormuz is not Iranian sovereign territory anymore.

It’s available real estate. It’s takeable. Anyone with courage can have it.

That’s a massive Overton Window shift delivered, in a tweet, as an insult to the UK.

A year ago “America controls the Strait of Hormuz” sounded like some twisted fantasy. Today Trump is telling Britain to go grab it themselves like it’s a parking spot.

In a few weeks, Trump has normalized the concept of Western control over the Strait so thoroughly that full US seizure now looks like the modest option compared to what he’s suggesting allies do on their own. This is intentional. …

Whatever the eventual deal includes (US Navy permanent presence, joint patrols, Iranian withdrawal from mining infrastructure) the public will accept it because Trump already told them the Strait is there for the taking. Your subconscious mind has already been primed to accept it. …

Trump isn’t describing reality. He’s installing it.

Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine:

What does Iran have to do with China? Everything.

Tehran runs on Chinese oil money, tech, and cover. This isn’t just a regional clash. It’s part of a broader fight against a China-backed axis. …

Tariffs and other economic measures are simply instruments the White House is deploying in a larger war against the China axis. … Targeting Venezuelan drug cartels, shutting down fentanyl shipments, and supporting allies like Argentina’s President Javier Milei to stand firm against Chinese encroachment into Latin American are as much a part of the campaign as Trump’s China tariffs. Campaigns against China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran and its proxies have dominated the U.S. news cycle the last year because the Trump administration sees the China axis as the most dangerous threat to our national security. It’s all about China.

Zerohedge:

The Trump administration is “methodically building a portfolio of assets” from Venezuela to the Panama Canal to Iran’s oil flows and the Strait of Hormuz, a strategy aimed at reasserting American dominance, securing the empire for years to come, and tightening the screws on Beijing after last year’s rare earths stunt.

“Iran and Kharg Island are next. Iran is a Chinese vassal and so Kharg Island is basically a Chinese asset. Iran and Kharg Island will soon be a U.S. asset. The same with the SoH — it will soon be a U.S. asset,” [Zoltan Pozsar of Ex Uno Plures] noted.

Dr Samuel Furfari on European delusions about fossil fuels:

The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz reveals a truth that many European policymakers have ignored: Humanity remains structurally dependent on oil. This reality, first highlighted during the 1973 oil shortage and reinforced by the 1979 version – triggered by Iran – continues to be neglected, even openly dismissed, by certain political elites. …

As a former official in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy for 36 years, I have witnessed relentless efforts to promote so-called alternatives to hydrocarbons and their disastrous results. Yet, in the face of the current crisis, the EU refuses to recognize its desperate need for fossil fuels.

In May 2023, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, declared that the fossil-fuel-based growth model is “simply obsolete.” The partial blockade of the Strait of Hormuz starkly exposes the irony of that statement. …

Today, roughly 75% of the primary energy consumed in the European Union comes from fossil fuels, while the global share remains about 87%. It is illusory to believe that “renewable” electricity can meet basic needs.

Bonchie:

People who spent a decade promoting the Iraq War are now certain that a month-old conflict of total military domination has been lost because it’s not over yet.

The lefties have lost it again

Australia’s Bad Choice in Infantry Fighting Vehicles

Australia’s Bad Choice in Infantry Fighting Vehicles. By David Archibald.

Back in the 1960s, Australia bought some 800 of the M113 armoured personnel carrier for battlefield transport of our infantry. That was when we had a population of 12 million.

In 2004 a project was started to replace them with 1,100 infantry fighting vehicles that would have thicker armour and heavier armament. I attended a briefing on this acquisition 20 years ago, at which it was apparent that the Army was set upon having its own special vehicle instead of buying something that was already in production and already proven to work. Many years passed and the Redback infantry fighting vehicle from the Korean company Hanwha was eventually selected. Hanwha designed the Redback to meet the conditions of the Australian Army tender.

 

Hanwha Redback

 

Then in 2023 the incoming Labor Government used the excuse of a strategic review to delay production and cut the order to just 129. This works out to one infantry fighting vehicle for every 209,302 Australians. This is not enough. We need at least ten times that number, as per the original intent in 2004. …

The unit cost of a Redback is $29 million for 40 tonnes of vehicle. The best alternative would have been the CV90 made by BAE — with the same capability, 30 years of operating experience, and a unit cost of $15.6 million. The Koreans aren’t bothering to make the Redback themselves. They think it is too heavy and Hanwha’s alternative weighs 28 tonnes. The Redback is an orphan class which no other country will ever buy. Only 129 of them might ever be built. After that contract is completed, we will still need another thousand or more infantry fighting vehicles to have an army with some substance to it. We would be better off switching to the CV90 and giving the Redbacks that do get built to an Army Reserve unit.

 

CV90 of the Czech Army

 

Drones:

On average, it takes about six drones to achieve a kill on a Russian soldier and 15 on a Russian armoured vehicle. There is one video of a Russian soldier surviving 11 near-misses by Ukrainian first-person-viewer drones before the twelfth drone hits him. …

The anti-drone systems already exist –- active protection systems such us Trophy and remote weapons systems. Hanwha’s contract … for the supply of R400 remote weapons systems is $108 million for 129 weapons, for a per unit cost of $0.83 million. Adding Iron Fist would take the cost of protecting a vehicle up to $1.5 million. It is the price of entry to the battlefield these days. So protected, tanks still have a role in demolishing the enemy’s concrete structures even if they don’t get to meet many enemy tanks.

Artillery today needs to be able to run away fast after firing:

In another defence acquisition that has been overtaken by the evolution of the battlefield, Australia bought a handful of Korean K9 self-propelled howitzers. What the Ukraine War has shown is that wheeled howitzers are more survivable than tracked ones.

Ukraine has found that Russian counter-battery radar can detect the firing positions of artillery and have drones swarming on that location within three minutes of firing. Wheeled howitzers can move off far more rapidly than tracked ones.

More at the link.