War on Iran was not ‘unprovoked’

War on Iran was not ‘unprovoked’. By Brendan ‘Neill in The Spectator.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase ‘unprovoked war’. It’s been rolling off leftist tongues since the explosion of hostilities in Iran. …

Here’s my question: is the rape and murder of Jews not a provocation? Was the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust — 7 October — not a provocation? The tyrants of Tehran were the paymasters of the jihadist brutes who carried out that slaughter. They lavished guns and training on that army of anti-Semites that invaded Israel by air, sea and land not even three years ago. That wasn’t a provoking act?

Is it not a provocation to rain thousands of missiles onto a neighbouring country? Is it not a provocation to subject a nation to a ballistic swarm that causes the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians and the deaths of scores of innocents, including 12 Druze kids playing football? That’s what Hezbollah has done these past three years. Hezbollah received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Islamic Republic to pursue precisely such violent badgering of the Jewish state. That isn’t a provocation? …

“Illegal”:

Then there’s ‘illegal war’. Says who? Who made the media into the judge, jury and executioner of when nations are permitted to fight? My view is simple: if it is against international law for the world’s only Jewish state to pursue the Islamist despots who funded the rape and murder of its citizens, then that law is an ass. Worse, it’s anti-Semitic.

Funny how only western countries do “illegal” war. Meanwhile, the left wants America and Israel to lose:

Like others, I’m worried about this war. But I’m more worried about the opposition to it. There is a wilful refusal to grapple with what is at stake in this theatre of tension. This is not ‘another Iraq’. That calamity was fuelled by untruths about Saddam’s threat to the West. The Islamic Republic *is* a threat. It has rained hyper-violence on our ally of Israel. Its barbarous proxies drag mayhem across the Middle East. Its theocratic intolerance stretches into the West, where it has funded terror. …

There’s a moral defeatism around this war that I find deeply troubling. There’s a kind of gleeful fatalism. You can feel it. Right now the nightly BBC News comes off as one long smirk at the troubles America has brought upon itself. You get the impression some people would even like to see America and Israel ‘taught a lesson’. To me it feels like cultural self-loathing in the drag of pacifism — a sentiment that is less the heir to the peace movements of old than a malignant outgrowth of the anti-Westernism that runs riot on our campuses and in our institutions.

If Iran wins:

I fear these people fail to appreciate how catastrophic it would be if the Islamic Republic were to emerge emboldened from this conflict. Both regionally, where the Jewish homeland would face a renewed threat, and globally, where Islamism would gain a new lease of life, it would be disastrous for humankind. I get it: war is ugly, ‘regime change’ is destabilising and Trump is nuts. But for all that, I can say with no qualms whatsoever that I want America and Israel to win this war, and to win it decisively.

America and Israel rushed into this war because the Chinese were starting to help Iran build a huge number of conventional missiles, In a few months Iran would have so many missiles that Israel and America could not afford to attack them, and soon they would have nukes. Islamic martyrs on a holy war, with nukes. So, now or never.

Hamas commanders:

Our issue is not just Palestine, our issue is killing every non-Muslim. We will pursue Jews and Christians all over the world. Either they convert to Islam or we’ll kill them!

 

Alexandra Marshall:

Sorry. If a religious group says they want to convert the whole world via the sword and treat the conquered as eternal slaves.

I’m going to have a ‘phobia’ about that.

Babylon Bee:

Tragedy: Liberal Gets Stabbed Before Finishing Telling People How Peaceful Islam Is

London Buses Must Now Be Equipped With Stab-Kits

London Buses Must Now Be Equipped With Stab-Kits. By Steve Watson at modernity news.

Calls for “bleed kits” to be rolled out across London’s bus network have gained traction, with the London Assembly unanimously backing a motion to install them in major bus stations and trial them on high-risk routes.

These kits, designed to stem severe bleeding from deep wounds, are pitched as a lifesaver in emergencies—yet their sudden necessity speaks volumes about the city’s descent into chaos under unchecked policies.

The push comes from the London Youth Assembly, highlighting how young people feel increasingly unsafe on public transport.

 

 

This rollout underscores a low-trust society where stabbings are dismissed as background noise, a grim reality fueled by open borders and soft-on-crime approaches.

Instead of tackling the root of this horrific reality, it is just being accepted that commuters are somewhat likely to be attacked and killed, as if it’s an accepted part of everyday life in London.

 

Seventh century Arabia reaches into Australia

Seventh century Arabia reaches into Australia. By Amanda Hodge in The Australian.

Nos Hosseini was barely six years old when she first felt the awful power and reach of Iran’s Islamic Republic her activist parents had fled when she was an infant.

A man in a white van speaking Farsi turned up at the gate of her Coburg West Primary School in suburban Melbourne insisting he had been sent to drop her home.

She remembers instinctively pushing back in fear, trying not to be rude but eventually relenting, climbing into the van and being driven home by the stranger, who delivered her safely to her parents with the chilling message: “Look how easy it was for us to come and get your daughter.” …

If anything, the intimidation has grown more intense in recent years as waves of popular protests have demand the regime’s dismantling.

As a teenage activist she received death threats and even ransom letters constructed, cinematically, with cut-out newspapers. Relatives in Iran were arrested and thrown in jail for her own family’s political activity in Melbourne.

Barely three years ago, around the time a headless chicken was dumped on her parents’ Melbourne doorstep, Hosseini’s cousin in Iran was once again arrested and asked during her interrogation: “Did your family like the present we left for them?” …

“It’s given Australia a glimpse into what life is like in Iran, … In Iran people are facing bullets, they’re being raped in prisons, suicides are staged.” …

Hostage:

Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian academic held hostage by the IRGC for more than two years after travelling to Tehran in 2018 for a conference.

The harassment didn’t end in Australia, however. She has been intimidated at public events, her computer hacked and financial details posted on a Farsi website. …

Running from the Mullahs:

Almost everyone who has migrated from Iran was “pushed to choose that path” by the regime, [Melbourne-based rapper Nabil “Ace” Esmaeili] says. “They pushed us to be politically active.”

It was the same for Mohammad Hashemi, who arrived in Australia as a 17-year-old, fresh from the political upheaval of the 2009 disputed presidential elections. … The civil engineer has since turned outrage at the Iranian regime’s brutality into one of Australia’s most sustained diaspora protest movements.

How does that compare with the communists or Nazis? Why are today’s leftists almost gleeful at every perceived setback for the Americans or Israelis?

Cooking: RFK Jr.’s latest proposal might be his most quietly radical yet

Cooking: RFK Jr.’s latest proposal might be his most quietly radical yet. By Raw Egg Nationalist, in American Greatness.

At a USDA event on Wednesday, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had plans to teach Americans how to cook so they can wean themselves off their addiction to the ultra-processed foods that are responsible, in large part, for the chronic disease epidemic ravaging the nation.

A full 70 percent of American adults are now overweight or obese; one in 31 children has an autism diagnosis; and rates of diabetes, digestive conditions, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancers are all rising sharply, especially among young people.

“One of the challenges we’re facing and that we’re working on — all kinds of innovative devices to solve — is that Americans have forgotten how to cook,” Kennedy told the audience.

He said Americans could feed themselves better food for less — if only they knew how.

“The convenience of fast food is one of the things that attracts them. And many of them don’t have cutlery, they don’t have pots and pans, they don’t have cutting boards, and they don’t know how to shop.

“And one of the things that we’re talking about now to HHS is to use the Commissioned Corps or other groups within our agency to go out and actually teach people to cook.” …

Big kitchen coming up? Just kidding, no such thing and never will be.

Americans make fewer meals for themselves and their loved ones than the average Western European, especially those in France or Italy. …

Kennedy is right that convenience is king, and many people feel that they are simply “too busy” or have “better things to do” than taking time to prepare and cook something fresh and, just as importantly, to sit down and eat it with the same love and attention that went into making it.

Although there have been significant changes to the way even the French and Italians eat—ultra-processed food has made enormous inroads in every nation of the developed world—real food is still an integral part of national and local identity, and for that reason, it is fiercely guarded. ..

If you want ordinary people to eat well and be healthy, they need to be empowered to do so. That means knowledge — How do I brown meat properly? How do I boil an egg? — but also access to particular resources, not least of all the right kinds of food. …

RFK Jr.’s new proposal is as radical as any other he’s made in the last year, although it may not seem to be. As much as any other policy — the changes to the vaccine schedule, the overhauling of food-additive regulations — it’s a move away from the passive, corporate-driven model that has made Americans the sickest people in history to an active, person-centered vision of health and vitality.

Home cooking is also cheaper.

Australia has new Blob Agency called the CDC to deal with the vaccine skeptics

Australia has new Blob Agency called the CDC to deal with the vaccine skeptics. By Joanne Nova.

The US CDC was one of the biggest institutional Big Government failures of the pandemic, and so naturally, Australia had to get one.

The aim of the new Australian Centre for Disease Control is not about our health per se, but to be an antidote to skepticism. No, seriously. They say that. The new Director General has “vowed to prioritise transparent medical evidence and proactive engagement with vaccine sceptics.”

You might think keeping stopping Ebola and nixing bioweapons would be higher on the list? Silly you. This agency will get $250 million dollars over the next four years to basically help sell vaccines for starving multinational pharmaceutical giants. “Trust us” they say.

It’s another “Independent” agency that’s 100% dependent on Big Government funding, so it’s not independent at all. It will always serve its paymaster. They’ve already swallowed the full United Nations mantra — taking a One Health approach that recognises the link between your health, climate change, and the importance of One World Government that you can’t vote out.

They may lie about their independence, but at least they are honest about their aims, and it has nothing to do with our health. Listen to the new head — she speaks like a marketing and PR guru who happens to have a medical degree:

 

The enemy of the CDC is not a Sarbecorvirus but social media influencers … The CDC don’t want to understand the drivers of dengue fever, they want to understand “distrust” …

How telling — did she really say she wants to “be seen as trusted?” — Dear Dr Wainer, I say, to share the lesson your parents forgot to teach you — you don’t create trust by studying it, you save lives and help people first and earn the trust the real way.

Speaking of her parents, which I normally wouldn’t — Zoe Wainer comes with a back-story about them that she sells to win us over. It’s part of the whole “trust” narrative — and it’s bound to appeal to any woke die-hard government-loving-lefty. Her father was a brave abortionist … who was “Committed to social justice” .

Clearly she hasn’t done her market research yet. Bragging about “social justice” is like waving a red flag to half the voters who just want to get the government out of their hair, their house and their blood.

And just to remind everyone of how degenerate and corrupt the US CDC has become, lets remember the time they tested a vaccine on 8 mice then approved it for 50 million children.

The motto of the Australian CDC tells us they supply “trusted information“. If they were trusted, they wouldn’t have to tell us.

It’s hard not to blurt out “tool of big government and big pharma.” Oops.

The Virus of Antisemitic Violence

The Virus of Antisemitic Violence. By The Free Press.

There were more synagogue attacks this week than days in the week.

  • Last weekend: Three shootings at synagogues within a 10-mile radius in Toronto.
  • On Monday: In Liège, Belgium, a synagogue was bombed.
  • On Thursday at noon: A man with a rifle and explosives drove into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
  • On Thursday afternoon: In Trondheim, Norway, police arrested a man for suspicious behavior outside a synagogue.
  • On the earliest hours of Friday: There was an arson attack at a Rotterdam synagogue.

And that’s just the last seven days.

To say this is simply “rising antisemitism,” which is typically how the headlines put it, misses the speed and severity of this virus.

We are living through an alarming, historic period in which the guardrails that previously kept this hate at bay have fallen away.

It’s happening in places with large Jewish communities, and those with just a handful of Jews. In America, a country once thought of as the best place in the world to be Jewish, 70 percent of all religion-based hate crimes are directed at Jews, a group that makes up less than 3 percent of the population.

It’s our job to keep up with all of it — and even we are struggling. If we can’t, and it’s our job to live and breathe this, how can you?

Anything to do with recent imports to the West? Any connection at all?

Media: No Motive Yet In Attack On Jewish Synagogue By Radical Muslim. By The Babylon Bee.

Though an outspoken Islamic extremist who originated from the Middle East and had expressed support for ISIS and loaded his car with explosives and rammed it directly into a synagogue and daycare facility, journalists explained that there simply wasn’t any way to know at this point why he committed such an act. …

“It’s difficult to settle on any one correlation,” [a] reporter said. “We’ll do our best to connect the dots, but quite frankly, this one is likely to remain a mystery.”

We’ve invited some people into our house who don’t behave well and keep killing some of the people who live here.

Conservative moved from antisemitic to neutral on Jews, because the anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist crew were into Marxism and anti-white hatred

Conservative moved from antisemitic to neutral on Jews, because the anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist crew were into Marxism and anti-white hatred. By Matt Forney.

A great deal of people who were openly anti-Semitic ten years ago have moved back towards neutrality/peaceful coexistence with Zionists because anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism is now brown-coded and left-coded.

I’m one of them. I was notorious enough during the alt-right era to get defamed in an ADL profile …

What changed?

After 10/7, the anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist discourse was revealed to be a fig leaf for Marxism and anti-white hatred.

The same people chanting “FREE PALESTINE” vote for Democrats, support DEI and mass immigration, and want to kill me for being white. The Israel/Palestine conflict is just an extension of their desire for a Rwanda-esque genocide, because they see Jews as white and Israel as a mini-America.

Spare me your genetics charts “proving” that Jews aren’t white. The left believes they’re white and they’ve imposed this view as a reality that you must deal with.

Does that mean Israel is ARE GREATEST ALLY or there aren’t problems with our relationship? Absolutely not. But when one side is aligned with you on some issues and the other wants you DEAD, it’s obvious who your true enemies are.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it wasn’t people with Israeli flags calling for me to be next. It was Palestine supporters. This is a very basic friend/enemy distinction that large numbers of the right have failed.

Moreover, I’m tired of the easily debunked conspiracy theories about Jews. Crap like “Greater Israel.” Ooooh, some minor Likud functionary talked about “Greater Israel.” Clearly the war in Iran is about lebensraum for the Zionazis! Or fabricated quotes from the Talmud. I’ve never read it. I’m not GONNA read it. If I wanted to experience a bunch of Jews arguing about minutia, I’d go to the Spring Valley Mall. At least there I can get lunch. …

Anti-Semitism is an affectation for brownoids and irony leftists  … And it always results in turning people into libtards. Fueñtes is now telling people to vote Democrat. The scattered remnants of the 2016 alt right were defending those losers in Minnesota who got shot by ICE because ICE are “ZOGbots.” Vote for Zohran Mamdani so some homeless schizo can shove you in front of a train, all because we need to own the Jews. This level of mental illness needs a DSM entry.

I’m neither an anti-Semite or a philo-Semite. Israel is just another country to me, one that can (and does) help further American goals. It is not the axis on which the world turns and the Jews are not the Borg. You don’t have to choose between Ben Shapiro and Nick Fueñtes. You can choose your own side. Mind-blowing concept to groypers (who basically have a George W. Bush view on the JQ: “if you’re not with us, you’re with the Zionists”). I’m with America.

Commenters:

They view us [Jews] as almost “mega-whites” ironically, and so naturally wish for people they think “pigmented” to savage us. …

Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my enemy too. Joining forces w Israel is actually America 🇺🇸 First.

Two million is too many

Two million is too many. By Craig Kelly.

By the time of next election, the Albanese regime will have imported well over two million new people on their watch.

This isn’t “migration” — it’s mass importation on an unprecedented scale, shattering every record and ignoring the will of everyday Australians. …

Far too many of these two million show zero interest in assimilating. They bring values and beliefs that directly clash with — and actively undermine — the Australian way of life: our freedoms, our traditions, our mateship, our fair go.

This isn’t enrichment; it’s dilution and erosion of what makes Australia worth living in. …

But:

Dare to say “TWO MILLION IS TOO MANY” and you’re instantly branded a “racist,” smeared, bullied, intimidated, and cancelled….

Every single day, more and more true blue Aussies are waking up, rejecting the intimidation, and standing shoulder-to-shoulder to fight back.

No wonder support for One Nation continues to grow.

 

 

When I was born (in Sydney), the population of Australia was only 10 million. So two million Albanese immigrants seems rather a lot.

Two protesters the first to be arrested over phrases banned in Queensland

Two protesters the first to be arrested over phrases banned in Queensland. By Catherine Strohfeldt in The SMH.

Two people have been arrested at a protest outside Parliament House just hours after Queensland’s new hate speech laws came into effect.

Shortly after 12.30pm on Wednesday, officers arrested a 33-year-old man at Speakers’ Corner for allegedly uttering a banned phrase [apparently “from the river to the sea”] during what police confirmed was an unauthorised pro-Palestine protest. …

Officers later arrested an 18-year-old woman, Bonnie Carter, at King George Square for allegedly wearing a shirt displaying a banned phrase. …

 

 

New laws passed through parliament last week outlawed two phrases commonly used by pro-Palestinian protesters – “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” – when used to incite hostility towards a group or when reasonably expected to offend the public. [The offence carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail.]

Craig Kelly:

I totally DISAGREE with what she says, but she should have the right to say it (or wear it on a T-shirt)

It’s borderline, but it doesn’t crosses the threshold of incitement.

Arresting people for their opinion, doesn’t change attitudes, it only hardens them.

And if you can be arrested for this, what other “slogans” could you be arrested for in the future. …

To those that understand the context, and find it highly offensive, the worst thing you could do is arrest her.

All you have done is turbo-charge the message, and created sympathy for it.

Censorship is not the answer, even to the most objectionable ideas.

And the irony. If she dressed in a top like that in Gaza or Iran, she’d be arrested — maybe even stoned.

Yes, it’s true. Multiculturalism really is incompatible with freedom of speech. Not offending assertive ethnic groups like the Muslims and Jews will drastically limit discussion eventually. Then there’s the gays and the trans people, where the issue is not even multiculturalism.

Disapproval, or perhaps even ostracism in nasty cases, is more appropriate than censorship. Ideas need to be aired, and bad ideas need to be argued with.

Why must we give up our freedoms, just because some activists are too precious and pushy? Censorship is just another form of propaganda and thought control, and we don’t want it.

China passes new ethnic minority law, prioritises use of Mandarin language

China passes new ethnic minority law, prioritises use of Mandarin language. By Reuters.

China passed a law on a “shared” national identity among the country’s 55 ethnic ‌minority groups on Thursday, a move critics say will further erode the identity of people who are not majority Han Chinese and risk making anyone challenging that “unity” a separatist punishable by law. …

Officially, China has 56 ​officially recognised ethnic groups, dominated by the Han Chinese, who account for more than 91% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.

China’s ethnic minority ​populations — including Tibetans, Mongols, Hui, Manchus, and Uyghurs — are concentrated in regions that together cover roughly half of the country’s land area, much of it rich in natural resources. …

The law … mandates ​that Mandarin is the basic language of instruction in schools, and for government and official business.
In public settings, where Mandarin and minority languages ​are used together, Mandarin must be given “prominence in placement, order, and similar respects.”

Is Taiwan part of China? David Archibald reports:

 

 

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Taboo truths: The Arab Response to the War on Iran

Taboo truths: The Arab Response to the War on Iran. By Avi Abelow at Front Page.

Western democracies are in serious trouble — not because they are weak, but because they still refuse to understand the nature of the war being waged against them.

For decades, Western elites have insisted that conflicts involving the Muslim world are primarily about politics, economics, colonial grievances, poverty, or social injustice. They have explained away jihad as a reaction to circumstance rather than an expression of belief. But much of the Muslim world does not see the conflict that way at all. It sees it as religious, civilizational, and existential.

Until the West understands that reality, it will continue to misread the Middle East, misread jihadist movements, misread the radicalization spreading inside its own societies, and endanger its own future. …

The latest war:

If Iran is attacking Arab Muslim countries too, why are those countries not joining the war to bring down the regime in Tehran?

Iran’s aggression is not directed only at Israel. Arab states have watched for years as Tehran threatened the region through missiles, proxies, sabotage, and terror. And today, the Iranian regime is shooting rockets at their oil infrastructure, airports, cities, shipping lanes, and internal stability. And yet, despite all that, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others are not publicly lining up beside Israel and the United States in a campaign to topple the Islamic regime.

To Western observers, this seems irrational.

It is not irrational. It is Islamic. …

Muslim governments are deeply reluctant to publicly align with non-Muslims against another Muslim power. Western strategists tend to believe that states act only according to interests, but in the Middle East, religion is not a decorative detail. It is often the central organizing force. Sunni and Shiite regimes may slaughter each other, as we have seen in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon, but even when Muslim states are bitter enemies, there remains enormous resistance to being seen siding openly with Jews or with the Christian West against a Muslim state. …

It’s not about borders, economics, or grievance, it’s about submission. Islam literally means submission.

But the deeper issue goes beyond Iran. The West still refuses to grasp that much of the jihadist war against it is not fundamentally about borders, economics, or grievance narratives. Those are the packaging. The core is religious and civilizational.

Both Sunni and Shiite jihadists understand this perfectly well. They speak the language of human rights when it helps them. They invoke victimhood when it is useful. They exploit democratic freedoms, multicultural guilt, legal protections, media cowardice, and elite confusion.

But their long-term goal is not coexistence. It is submission.

Uh oh:

While Western elites keep arguing over terminology, jihadist ideology continues to spread across Europe and North America — city by city, institution by institution, school by school, and increasingly, office by office — exploiting open societies that still lack the moral clarity to recognize the threat.

The free world cannot afford to remain this naïve. This war cannot be stopped halfway. Stopping before the Islamic regime collapses would produce the worst possible outcome: a wounded but surviving Iranian regime, terrified Arab states forced back into submission, renewed Iranian expansion across the region, a stronger China in its strategic contest with the United States, and a global jihadist movement emboldened by yet another display of Western weakness.

That is not de-escalation. It is surrender by installments.

 

 

The war should end only when the Islamic regime is toppled and replaced. Anything less guarantees that the same threat will return, bloodier, bolder, and better positioned. Until that happens, much of the Arab and Muslim world will keep doing exactly what it is doing now: taking the hits, staying quiet, and watching to see whether America finally has the will to finish the job.

You may think you’re not a target of Jihad because you don’t consider yourself a Christian. But it’s not what you think that matters. If you’re a white westerner, they think you’re Christian.

AIs and “stealing” knowledge — the collective is destroying the motivation for generating new knowledge

AIs and “stealing” knowledge — the collective is destroying the motivation for generating new knowledge. By Peter Girnus., who works for for Google’s Threat Intelligence Group.

Don’t steal from Google:

I published a report this month about “distillation attacks” — when outside actors query our models thousands of times to extract the underlying logic and replicate it.

We identified over 100,000 prompts from a single campaign. We called it “intellectual property theft.” We called it a “violation of our Terms of Service.” We said it “represents a form of IP theft” that we would disrupt, mitigate, and potentially pursue legal action against.

What Google stole from the world:

I need to tell you how we built the model they are trying to steal.

We scraped the internet. The entire internet. We crawled every website, every forum, every blog, every book we could digitize, every academic paper, every Reddit comment, every news article, every piece of creative writing that anyone ever posted anywhere.

We did not ask. We did not compensate. We did not attribute. We ingested the collective output of human civilization and called it a training dataset. …

We built Gemini on the commons. Every blog post, every open-source project, every Stack Overflow answer, every personal essay someone wrote at 2 AM — we ingested it, we processed it, we monetized it. The people who wrote those things did not receive an email. They did not receive a check. They received a subscription offer. …

Researchers found over 200 million copyright symbols in our training data. Publishers discovered that Gemini can reproduce entire chapters of their books verbatim. There are active lawsuits. Disney sent cease-and-desist letters. The European Publishers Council filed an antitrust complaint. A class action is expanding. A hearing is scheduled for May.

Double standard:

We called what we did “research.”

We called what they are doing to us “theft.”

I want to explain the difference.

  • When we scrape the entirety of human knowledge without permission and use it to build a commercial product we sell for $20 a month, that is innovation.
  • When someone queries our model 100,000 times through the API we provide to extract the reasoning we built from their data, that is a distillation attack.

The distinction is that we did it first. And we wrote the Terms of Service.

I should explain what “distillation” means. It is when someone takes the output of a mature model and uses it to train a smaller, cheaper model. The knowledge flows from the teacher to the student. We call this theft when it happens to us. We call it “knowledge distillation” when we do it to the open web. We even have a product page for it. You can distill Gemini, with our permission, using our tools, for a fee. You cannot distill Gemini without our permission. The underlying technique is identical. The difference is the invoice.

Legal both ways??

In December 2025, we sued a company called SerpApi for scraping our search results. In the same quarter, publishers sued us for scraping their books. We are simultaneously the plaintiff and the defendant in the same crime. The crime is copying. We have filed it under two different categories depending on the direction.

Still, AIs are great tools. But if compensating the generators of knowledge is not done fairly, generation of knowledge will wither. If someone can’t benefit from the effort and risk of research or origination, why bother?

I am reminded of pop music. Up until the Internet, rock stars made megabucks from record sales. But now that everyone copies music, the originators don’t make nearly as much. And hasn’t music become poorer for it, with few new or original tunes anymore. Where as in the five decades prior to 2000, there was a veritable torrent of new and interesting music, and there were rock/pop stars. Now: no reward, no motivation. Welcome to the collective, welcome to the longhouse.

UPDATE:

‘Death to America’ chants echo across US campuses

‘Death to America’ chants echo across US campuses. By Emily Sturge at Campus Reform.

For nearly five decades, Iran has chanted “Death to America.”

Now that same message is echoing across American college campuses.

Students are marching in support of Iran, chanting anti-American slogans, and celebrating violence against the United States. This disturbing trend is fueled by radical campus activism and the ideological environment inside America’s universities.

After the United States and Israel carried out targeted strikes against Iranian leadership on Feb. 28, an anti-Israel student group linked to Columbia University posted the phrase “Marg bar Amrika,” which is Farsi for “Death to America.” Photos circulating on social media show protesters at Yale University marching on campus with signs displaying the same slogan. The violent phrase calling for the death and destruction of the U.S. has been chanted by Iran’s regime for decades.. …

Students across the country at schools like San Jose State University in California, Louisiana State University, and the University of Illinois Chicago marched in support of Iran and cheered for retaliation against America.

Meanwhile, at British universities (and prisons):