The Freedom to Eat Meat

The Freedom to Eat Meat. By Sama Hoole.

In medieval England, the peasant got caught poaching a deer from the lord’s forest and lost his hand for it.

In Tokugawa Japan, the shogun banned red meat for the commoners on spiritual grounds. The samurai class quietly carried on.

In Soviet Russia, meat rations for the ordinary worker were tiny. Party officials ate differently.

In 1940s Britain, beef was rationed. The War Cabinet dined on steak.

Today, meat is framed as a planetary evil by think tanks funded by industrial grain conglomerates and billionaires with plant-based portfolios, while lentils are recommended to the public and wagyu is served at the conference in Davos.

Every era has its own method. The method changes. The pattern does not.

The people at the top eat the meat. The people at the bottom are told they shouldn’t.

A very illuminating story:

The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.

Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors’ accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.

For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.

Consider what they were leaving.

A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king’s property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional memory of not taking one goes back five hundred and fifty-two years.

Then the stories arrive. From sailors. From ship’s captains. From merchants returning through Bristol and Plymouth.

The birds come in flocks that darken the sky for three days. Not an afternoon. Three days. Passenger pigeons in numbers later estimated at three to five billion in a single flock, making a sound early settlers compared to the roar of a river that refused to stop. A man with a net could take five hundred in an afternoon. The king of England had no claim on the sky over Massachusetts.

The rivers, the captains said, ran so thick with salmon that the water appeared to boil. The deer walked into camp, looked at the fire, and were shot. The oysters on the Atlantic shore came the size of dinner plates, piled in reefs you could lean over the side of a boat to harvest. Turkeys weighing thirty pounds stood in clearings with the fearlessness of an animal that had never been hunted by anything on two legs. Bison herds on the plains took four hours to cross a ford.

And nobody, crucially, owned any of it.

The father in Devon lies awake that night thinking about the sky going dark for three days. He is also thinking about religious freedom. Theological persecution was real. The Mayflower passenger list included genuine dissenters. That was part of it. It was not, for most of them, the biggest part.

The biggest part was that the animals in the captain’s story belonged to nobody, and the family had been watching animals that belonged to somebody else walk past their cottage for twenty generations.

Between 1620 and 1640, roughly 20,000 people made the crossing. By 1700, 250,000. By 1900, fifty million Europeans had crossed, most of them peasants from cultures where meat had been restricted for centuries, most of them arriving within the first generation at a standard of eating their grandparents would not have believed.

A labourer in Pennsylvania in 1750 was eating more meat per week than an English nobleman had eaten in 1450. An Irish emigrant’s grandchild in Boston in 1900, whose great-grandmother had starved in 1847 while Irish cattle were shipped past the coffin ships to English markets, was eating steak on a Tuesday and not thinking about it.

At the centre of the great migration was hunger. Specifically, hunger for meat. Enforced since 1066, reinforced by Enclosure for another four hundred years, reinforced by the quiet understanding that the venison belonged to the lord and the pottage belonged to you. …

You could eat like a lord without owing a lord anything. They crossed an ocean for that. And having got to it, they did not give it back.

Lest we forget.

Middle-class lefty professionals are proudly shoplifting as an act of ‘political resistance’

Middle-class lefty professionals are proudly shoplifting as an act of ‘political resistance’. By Lauren Shirreff at The Telegraph.

These are the strange new rules of shoplifting. It is acceptable — even laudable –to steal from chain supermarkets, so long as you are a wealthy person doing it all in the name of progressive values.

If this shocks you, there is help at hand. The NYT’s Opinion podcast recently published a segment about this new frontier in modern politics, which is becoming just as much of a phenomenon among middle-class 20- and 30-somethings in Britain as it is in New York – where most young professionals voted for Zohran Mamdani as mayor last year, and consider it a point of great pride that their city is now led by an ardent socialist.

In the podcast, the NYT’s culture editor, Nadja Spiegelman, explains what she has termed “microlooting”. There is “a slight political valence” to this kind of theft, she says, “as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something”. It sounds like the kind of thing a university student might say after attending their first lecture on Marxism.

Sure, there’s the excuse, but given how wealthy they are it doesn’t hold water:

Jia Tolentino, 37, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the owner of the $2.2m Brooklyn townhouse, later admits that she’d stolen from Whole Foods on “several occasions”, including a handful of lemons. Having forgotten to pick them up as part of her shop, she simply swiped four of them on her way out the door. “I didn’t feel bad about it at all,” she declares.

The reasoning, viewers learn, is that big organisations such as Whole Foods underpay their staff while raising the price of their goods to boost their own margins. Companies and their bosses are, supposedly, not “playing fair” by hoarding their profits. Stealing from them is therefore not just permissible, but a political act — a part of sticking it to the man and a valiant hobby to discuss over $25 cocktails in Manhattan. …

It can be taken as a sign of acute social breakdown in both the US and UK, where young professionals feel that the system is stacked against them, making it impossible for them to own a house and drive an expensive car as their parents might have done. A sense of social injustice appears to be sparking an extraordinary new crime wave. Why not shoplift when you’ll never get the lifestyle you want through honest hard work?

In certain circles, “everyone” does it:

I am 25, and have met a lot of people who freely admit to (or, indeed, boast about) shoplifting prolifically. In most cases, it’s not those struggling to make ends meet in minimum wage jobs, but the ones earning £60,000 a year or more in offices, while happily forking out hundreds on drinks on a Friday night.

These are people who could easily afford their monthly £200 Zara hauls, but are instead stuffing their bags and walking out proudly as the alarms go off, knowing that, under the protection of class and status, the security staff would never suspect them of theft …

These days, “it sometimes feels like everyone I know steals from Whole Foods”, wrote an author called Nora DeLigter in a piece for New York magazine last month. …

In New York, “loads of people” steal, confirms Rebecca*, in her mid-20s, who recently moved to London from the Big Apple. The city “is full of these people who are armchair socialists, so it’s OK to shoplift from a Target or a Trader Joe’s, but you’d never do it from a bodega or a mom-and-pop shop [a small, family-run store]”.

Lefties are entitled to your stuff too, didn’t you know?

Whales, Horsesh*t, and Technological Stagnation

Whales, Horsesh*t, and Technological Stagnation. By Jimmy Carr interviewed by Joe Rogan.

Whales –> petrochemicals:

Carr: You know what the biggest industry in the world was in 1903?

Rogan: Beavers?

Carr: Very close. I’ll pass you — I’ll give you a C. Whaling was the biggest industry in the world in 1903. And it disappeared almost overnight. In about a year and a half, it was gone. Those towns were just emptied because whale oil wasn’t required anymore. Suddenly, we discovered petrochemicals.

Rogan: Electricity too.

Carr: Petrochemicals was really the thing. Yeah — whale oil, electricity, Edison, all of that, Tesla. It’s really interesting how that industry just fell away.

Horse manure –> cars:

Carr: It’s like the story of horse manure in New York City. You know this?

Rogan: No.

Carr: So, horse manure –do you know why brownstones have steps up to the front door? Ever wondered why the ground floor isn’t actually on the ground floor?

Rogan: Why?

Carr: Horseshit.

Rogan: Really?

Carr: There was horseshit everywhere. They’ve always got those metal scrapers by the side—

Rogan: Yeah, to get the horseshit off.

Carr: Exactly. You know how old movies always talk about smelling salts? There are loads of references to them. The smell was horrific. If a horse died in the street, you had to wait for it to decompose before cutting it up and taking it away. New York was chaos—cobbled streets, metal wheels on carts, horses everywhere. So they made laws: “Right, we’ll tax horses.” Didn’t change anything.

Next year: “We’ll double the taxes.” Then more rules — if you have a horse, you have to do this, do that. They kept trying, over and over.

And what actually stopped it?

Henry Ford. Cars came along — [and then, horses in the streets] gone. Almost instantly. There are, what, five horses left in Central Park? That’s it.

Glenn Reynolds articulated years ago , in 2017, what few notice until it is pointed out:

Despite the rise of computers and the Internet, most of my lifetime has been spent in what has otherwise been a time of technological stagnation, compared to the “golden quarter century” between World War II and the Moon landings. During that era, things were getting better at breakneck pace: Jet planes! Spaceships! The Pill! Antibiotics! Nuclear Power! Computers! The future was coming at us fast, and there was a sense that things would keep improving.

Then it all just … slowed way down. The 45 years since the last moon landing haven’t seen nearly as much visible progress, smartphones notwithstanding. And I think that has sapped the vitality of our culture in a number of ways.

Lest we forget.

Ship Of Shame: Australia Saved By Trump’s Emergency Fuel Shipments

Ship Of Shame: Australia Saved By Trump’s Emergency Fuel Shipments. By ZeroHedge.

Despite … the fact that countries like Australia have made it clear that they will not aid the US in reopening the Strait of Hormuz (which Australia relies on for the majority of its energy supplies), Trump has offered considerable help to prevent Australia from facing total economic collapse.

Australians are calling it the “Ship of Shame” — a series of refined fuel imports from the US over the course of the past month which are preventing the country crossing the “dry up” threshold.…

Without these US shipments, the country was four weeks away from critical shortages and potential industry shutdowns. Australian political leaders have proven to be either incompetent or indolent in their responsibilities to prepare the country for energy emergency. …

The US sent around 240,000 metric tons of fuel products in March alone, the largest amount to Australia in over 30 years, with more on the way. Along with some alternative supplies coming from Africa, Malaysia and other markets, Australia’s emergency reserves are actually greater than they were before the war in Iran (with an extra 10 days of supply on top of their previous totals). …

Lesson learned (at least by some):

The lesson is clear; economic interdependency is a mistake and “just in time” supply chains are foolish. Furthermore, green energy is utterly useless and a form of economic suicide. Australia is a perfect model for what not to do when developing a national energy policy.

The globalists promoted the idea a couple of decades ago for one interdependent world where everyone behaved nicely. Economic output would be maximized if everyone only did what they were best at, and imported the rest. Sounded great.

But China didn’t play by the rules. It massively exploited the system, encouraging most of the world’s manufacturing industry to move to China then stealing their intellectual property. Globalism was always a silly idea, in retrospect, but — like net zero — Australia fell for it hard.

Btw, the Iran war further illustrates the truism that Australians were dependent on the Royal Navy until 1941, then the US Navy after 1941. Our “progressives” have no idea of reality.

The history of the last decade of US politics just profoundly changed

The history of the last decade of US politics just profoundly changed. By Hans Mahncke.

Kudos to the New York Post for being the only major outlet to get this right.

The SPLC were paying the leaders. By definition, leaders cannot be informants.

They run the operation. It is like paying the leader of Auschwitz to inform on who is carrying out the gassings instead of paying him to stop the gassings.

It is perhaps the most grotesque, cynical, and pernicious racket ever devised. Of course, plenty of groups extract money from taxpayers and well-meaning donors off problems they inflate, but this is far worse because it breeds real hatred and manufactures racial division to keep the grift alive.

Jeffrey Tucker:

These revelations profoundly change the history of the last decade of US politics. …

The hate movement and the anti-hate movement, it turns out, were the same entities.

Stephen Miller:

You’re talking about a 10 year narrative from our national media based on fraud. It’s been their main topic. It’s been at the forefront of every story that they approach.

It’s been the main focus of everything they’ve done, or published or broadcasted in a decade and it was all mostly made up. They can’t just let it go and they won’t.

They are going to dig in on this unlike anything that we have seen before.

Kira:

The SPLC thing is so much worse than corruption. Charlottesville is a lie that tore this entire country asunder. In the face of loneliness epidemic post-COVID, some of the most important relationships in American society were severed for this lie – parents and children, brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends. And a country divided against itself cannot stand. That is civil war.

Commenter:

Engineering a civil war is how you destabilise a nation from within. Bring in mass migration, give welfare to illegals, prop up both the far right and far left, engineer race grievance and identity politics = fertile grounds for civil war.

Ed Dowd:

The SPLC is an NGO.

They are the extreme example of creating the problem to raise money from the problem. Fraud basically.

All NGOs have an inherent conflict of interest. They raise money to supposedly solve a problem. Once problem solved the money drys up.

It’s a perverse incentive structure.

 

White supremacy is a beat up??

The rise of white supremacy was a media generated narrative. This is observable:

Commenters:

Credit ought to go to politicians such as Joe Biden, who repeatedly mentioned the “very fine people on both sides” hoax.

It’s was the greatest DC grift play ever and it worked!

Biden got elected. He unlocked trillions in fraudulent funding across every state and county in the country, turning those around DC into the richest of them all.

Brave AI:

President Joe Biden repeatedly stated that white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States, calling it the “most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland” and the “most lethal threat to the homeland today.” He made these remarks in multiple high-profile settings.

Biden emphasized that this assessment is based on intelligence community findings and reiterated it consistently across different platforms, stating, “Not ISIS, not al Qaeda — White supremacists.” His administration identified white supremacists as the “most persistent and lethal threat.”

SPLC ignored anti-white hate. By Paul Sperry at The New York Post:

At least 2,000 educators around the country reported racist slurs and other derogatory language leveled against white students in the first days after Donald Trump was elected president. But the group that surveyed the teachers [ the SPLC] didn’t publish the results in its report on Trump-related “hate crimes.” …

“They left that result out because it would not fit their ideological narrative,” former Education Department civil rights attorney Hans Bader said. “It was deemed an inconvenient truth.” …

SPLC’s schools report … sparked breathless coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and other major media….

“These flawed SPLC reports will be cited by left-wing special interests to try to block the confirmation of moderate and conservative people to posts such as attorney general by falsely making it look like America’s schools and streets are pervaded by bigotry,” Bader said.

This Screaming Match Between Greg Gutfeld and Jessica Tarlov on ‘The Five’ Was Brutal. By Matt Margolis at PJ Media.

Greg Gutfeld absolutely destroyed Jessica Tarlov on The Five on Thursday, and boy did things get crazy. It was the kind of television that makes you put down your phone and actually pay attention. The two went back and forth, screaming at each other over the question of whether the American right-wing threat narrative has always been overblown, ginned up, or an outright fabrication.

And boy did Gutfeld come in swinging… and he never really stopped, either.

It started when Tarlov pushed back on Gutfeld’s characterization of hate crime hoaxes, demanding examples. Gutfeld was ready.

“Jussie Smollett, anyone?” he fired back. “How about the banana peel on the bench?”

Tarlov, never one to care about facts, tried to pivot to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as evidence that the white supremacist threat is real. “You don’t think that hundreds of people showed up at the Unite the Right rally that weren’t this informant, that weren’t persuaded by his vehicle that got them there,” she said. But when Gutfeld pressed her on exactly who that informant was, she stumbled.

“You don’t know,” Gutfeld said. “Was it the leader? An informant is not a leader.”

From there, the exchange got really tense. Tarlov rattled off group names — Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys — while Gutfeld challenged her framing of the whole event.

“So you’re saying this wasn’t created. You’re saying this just was an organic event, just like every left-wing event. It just happened. All these right-wingers showed up,” he said.

Tarlov tried to split the difference, insisting the people were real even if the event was organized. Gutfeld acknowledged as much, but turned the whole argument on its head with an analogy that was equal parts devastating and sharp.

“Let me do the simplest analogy. This is like when somebody says, ‘On average, men are taller and weigh more than women.’ And then one woman goes, ‘But what about her?’ And they point to a WNBA player. Yes, Jessica, I’ll give you, there probably is a bigot somewhere. But you guys created a false flag that there was this immense movement going on in this country that then put targets on people like Charlie Kirk’s back, and he’s dead.”

And he kept going, making clear this goes well beyond one rally or one incident.

“A lot of other people were either threatened, physically attacked because of a false flag, which painted … basically millions of people as white supremacists,” he said.

He still wasn’t done. Gutfeld went to a darker hypothetical — what happens to a country that keeps getting fed this narrative without any correction?

“You guys ran with it. Imagine if Trump had not won and Kamala Harris had won. Imagine where the SPLC would be now. Imagine how torn apart this country would be. And by the way, I hope that this thing mends, but I don’t know. Because there are people like you, Jessica, who have such a sunk cost in this belief that you were tricked into believing, to think that there’s all these racists hiding behind every Cracker Barrel.”

Then came the sharpest line of the whole segment — a pivot that reframes the entire racism debate in a way that the mainstream media has spent years desperately trying to avoid.

“No, you know where the racists were?” Gutfeld asked. “They were the anti-racist black activists who saw this as a way to go after whites. This racism that you created was designed to allow for a different kind of racism.”

He closed by drawing a contrast that was clean, blunt, and genuinely hard to argue with: “We don’t have to defend our racists because we don’t know who they are because you create them. Meanwhile, we don’t have to make up your racists because you’re standing there with Hasan Piker. These guys are right there in our face.”

Surely it’s not just the SPLC? Marc Andreessen:

So @grok, we all just discovered that the SPLC has allegedly been funding some of the worst of the people and groups it claims to oppose. What are other activist pressure groups that advocate censorship/deplatforming of their enemies that could be doing the same thing?

Grok: Groups like the ADL (which tracks “hate” and pushes deplatforming while accused of overreach on critics), Media Matters (drives ad boycotts against conservative speech), and CCDH (reports targeting platforms for censorship) operate on similar models: identifying enemies to fuel donations and advocacy. No proven SPLC-style fraud yet, but their incentives mirror the risks exposed here — perpetual threats keep the funding flowing. Transparency audits would help everywhere.

Surely it’s not just the USA? What about Australia? Those Nazi groups in Australia appear at awfully convenient times and places for the left, and the media is always tipped off beforehand to take photos and magnify their effect. Hmmm.

High trust society? Remember that?

High trust society? Remember that?

USA:

Detroit officials are begging residents to not steal fire hydrants, which are going missing across the city …

USA again:

I just walked into CVS in D.C. and you have to ask an employee to unlock the door if you want to buy garbage bags and paper towels.

I asked why?

“People steal.”

The employee then explained that in D.C. they don’t hold criminals so they have organized rings who steal then hand it to others to resell it. The robbers can steal up to a certain amount worth and will be released each time so they max out.

This is not a third world country. This is our nation’s capital. This is what Democrats are doing to our cities.

 

Japan (almost no migration):

Meanwhile in Japan, iPhones and Macs are on display without any tethers.

Australia used to be like that.

Leftie Men Are Becoming Extinct

Leftie Men Are Becoming Extinct. By Peter St Onge.

Liberal men are checking out of the gene pool, to the point just 1 in 8 American kids has a liberal dad.

When liberal Tiktokkers complain about their Trumper Dad, they might reflect that Trumper Dads are the only reason they exist.

Lozzy B.

I don’t know ANY women that have said that they are glad that they never had children.

All I hear is stories of regret.

She like many will wait until it is too late & decide that she wants children & will go through hell trying to conceive via IVF.

Commenters:

Purple hair. Checks out. I heard a good point once,“Imagine how badly you have to abuse a mammal to make it not want offspring”. Feminism is abuse.

Possibly related (by Zarathustra):

Much of the sexual market dysfunction+fertility crisis (specifically, mediocre women convinced of their superiority to men of equal caliber) is downstream of those same women pulling cartoonishly inflated salaries from cartoonishly inflated fake email jobs, a racket underwritten+enforced in part by the Civil Rights Abomination+its insidious tentacles threaded throughout the DEI+HR superplex.

Example:

In reference to this example, US Senator Eric Schmitt writes:

NYT frames this as if USAID employees had a quasi-property right to high-paying, taxpayer-funded jobs.

In reality, this tells a darker story — we spent half-a-century debt-financing a managerial class of Leftists whose only qualifications were ideological.

Migration visualization

Migration visualization. By Benjamin Grundy.

 

 

Pauline Hanson slams ‘open borders’ Greens for campaigning in Punjabi

Pauline Hanson slams ‘open borders’ Greens for campaigning in Punjabi. By The Noticer.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has criticised far-left party the Greens for printing campaign posters in Punjabi ahead of a crucial federal by-election. …

“Remember, the Greens stand for open borders, mass migration and further division in this country.” …

Farrer, which borders Victoria and South Australia in NSW’s southwest and is the second-largest electorate in the state, was 2% Indian-born at the time of the 2021 Census, with 2,078 people (1.2% of the population) speaking Punjabi at home, making it the most common language other than English.

Craig Kelly:

The AEC spent over $500,000 trying to sue me in the Federal Court.

Their allegation? That the authorisation statement at the bottom of my election signs — “Authorised by Craig Kelly” with my office address — was ILLEGIBLE. They seriously argued the font was too small, even though any voter could walk right up and read it clearly from two metres away.

But:

Yet the same AEC happily allows entire election signs to be written in foreign languages that are completely illegible to the vast majority of Australian voters.

And if people can’t read English, should they even be on the electoral roll and voting? How the hell can someone make an informed decision on who to vote for if they can’t read English?

That’s because you’re not on the globalist team, Craig.

When the law is applied unequally, the rule of law has been lost, replaced by the authoritarian rule of whoever is selecting when to enforce the law.

Trump’s Blockade Is Breaking Iran And European Elites Are Angry

Trump’s Blockade Is Breaking Iran And European Elites Are Angry. By Brandon Smith.

The effectiveness of the blockade is already apparent; the propaganda bots on social media are scrambling to find a narrative to counter it, but they are failing. Why? Because Iran already tried to lock down the strait (which is an international waterway), and any government cheering (or secretly cheering) for Iran’s actions is now unable to make a rational argument against the US doing the same thing to Iran.

As I noted in March:

“We constantly hear about international exposure to the Hormuz shutdown, but the media rarely mentions that Iran is the MOST exposed economy of all. For now, Iranian oil ships continue to pass through the strait and these vessels are Iran’s economic lifeline. Strategic estimates suggest that without the steady passage of these oil tankers, the Iranian economy would completely collapse within five weeks…

“Iranian cargo ships can be targeted for seizure by a US blockade of the Persian Gulf well away from the narrow waters of the Hormuz. …

“With Iran’s economy in shambles, they will no longer be able to purchase missiles or drones for resupply from Russia and China. They won’t be able to pay for logistic resources for their military and they won’t be able to contain public unrest. The Iranians would be forced to negotiate and the war would be over quickly with minimal risk to US troops.”

For now, the US is not seizing Iran’s tankers and is merely sending them back to where they came from. …

I think every action the Trump Administration has take so far from Venezuela to Iran has largely been designed to contain China. …

I think it’s vitally important to address some lies and disinformation being spread by propagandists and foreign agents online about the US blockade, so let’s quickly go down the list…

Lie #1: The US Is Blocking All Ships Traveling Through The Strait

This is false. The US is only blocking ships coming from Iranian ports. All other ships have been allowed to pass without incident. This lie is being spread by disinfo agents all over social media and it is also being spread by foreign governments from the UK to France to China. This, to me, says A LOT about the true agenda of these countries, given that they said little or nothing about Iran locking down the strait.

Lie #2: Chinese Vessels Have Broken The Blockade And The US Is Afraid

Nope. All Chinese vessels coming from Iranian ports have been turned away and any vessels coming from alternative ports have been allowed to pass. At the time this article is being published, only one ship from an Iranian port has allegedly slipped through the blockade, though the story on this ship might be fabricated. All other Iranian ships have been repelled.

Lie #3: The Blockade Puts US Naval Ships At Serious Risk

No, it does the opposite. US ships have no need to traverse the narrow Hormuz to blockade it. All they have to do is wait outside of it and turn back Iranian tankers that approach. No mines, no missiles, no drones, no tiny attack boats, nothing Iran has the ability to deploy has much of a chance of harming the US Navy. …

Lie #4: Iran Is Used To Sanctions And Can Hold Out Longer Than The US

No, they can’t. Only 7% of energy exports going to the US travel through the Hormuz …  Iran is reportedly losing around $430 million each day that their ships remain stuck in the strait, and they have already taken around $270 billion in infrastructure damages. Iran pays for new weapons and military logistics with oil revenues. Their soldiers are paid in part with oil revenues. They mitigate civil unrest with oil revenues.

I suspect that the blockade will force Iran back into negotiations within a couple weeks. That’s how little time they have left.

Lie #5: Iran Has Alternative Ways To Bypass The Blockade

No, they don’t. Overland routes without ample pipelines are no substitute for the ease of oil tanker shipments. Even if they did have such pipelines, those lines could be easily destroyed. …

Recent news indicates that Iran has already halted all petrochemical exports until further notice. If true, this proves that the blockade is highly effective.

Lie #6: The Chinese Will Intervene And Force The Strait To Reopen

As noted, the strait is not closed. Only Iranian ports are closed. Furthermore, China has stayed away from direct intervention in the Hormuz because they simply don’t have the naval capacity to square off with the US even if they wanted to. …

Lie #7: The US Is Losing All Its Allies Over The Blockade

Wrong. What the blockade (and the war in general) is doing is exposing the countries which were pretending to be our allies when it was convenient. …

Globalist liars:

The fact that the European elites are suddenly so concerned with the US blockade, enough to call for a “coalition” to reopen the strait and “circumvent” the US, tells us all we need to know.

I continue to believe that the globalists in these nations have been feeding off the US while at the same time organizing a “multicultural alliance” behind the scenes — a socialist new world order to supplant western civilization and leave the US behind as a husk.

Part of this agenda clearly involves a partnership with Islamic fundamentalists as a goon squad to oppress native western populations. This is why the elites have flooded Europe with third world migrants — ignoring the concerns of citizens and even arresting people who speak out. …

The blockade, I believe, is so effective that it has struck fear in Iran, fear in China, and fear in the liberal order in Europe which was counting on the war to drag on for months or years. Look at how angry they all are that Trump flipped the script on the Hormuz?

Why all the emotion and irrational hand wringing after the strait has been opened to MORE ships and oil traffic? Why all the panic when oil prices are falling? It doesn’t make sense unless they WANT the US to fail.

It feels like the globalist West versus Trump’s USA.

The Stock Market Is Calling ‘Bullshit’ On Mainstream’s Narrative. By ZeroHedge and Hugh Hendry.

The stock market is telling a different story from the ‘Iran is strong, America is overreaching’ narrative being spewed by mainstream media. …

The transatlantic intelligentsia of the coastal elites and the European Sophistocrats, tell you the same goddamn thing:

  • Iran, Darling, Iran has the upper hand. The strait is their choke point.
  • Trump, Trump, that clown he’s out of his depth. He’s a reckless vulgarian, and he’s dragging all of us into another disaster.
  • While the patient, chess-playing Iranians, they hold every card as they sip tea in Tehran.

My brothers and sisters, this is not journalism. It’s a fucking echo chamber.

The market, where people put their money on the line:

The market did not hedge. The market it didn’t even blink. It just fucking ignored it.

It went the other way. It made fresh all-time highs whilst the entire elitist Tehran-centric fantasy was still being printed as gospel. …

Iran’s oil system is not built to pause. It’s built to flow. It’s a flow system. Oil cannot simply sit in the ground while strategists argue over maps and how much uranium dust to give over. It has to move. Iran and its system has to move continuously from the rock underground to the tanker in the harbor to the Chinese buyer in Asia. Pause long enough, and the whole machine breaks.

Interrupt that flow. And the problem isn’t just lost revenues of like forty, fifty, sixty billion dollars. It’s the least of your concerns. The problem is physical and is irreversible. …

PMorgan’s latest estimates: “…with a “total export blackout” having effectively started this weekend, Iran now has about 15 days before it has to begin production shut-ins, which then have to be fully completed by day 30, or sometime around May 20.”

Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI — created by a guy in India who made a mint off lonely men online

Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI — created by a guy in India who made a mint off lonely men online. By Zoe Hussain in The New York Post.

A comely MAGA influencer who racked up millions of followers with patriotic content of her posing in a bikini while ice fishing, drinking Coors Light and shooting guns has been unmasked — as an Indian man who put himself through med school on the proceeds of his trickery.

“Sam,” a 22-year-old orthopedic surgeon in training, told Wired that he got the idea to sell AI-generated images of a young woman in a bikini while scrounging for money in school — and trying to save up enough to emigrate to the US after graduation.

He turned to Google’s Gemini AI for advice and decided to create a “hot girl” crafted specifically for the “MAGA/conservative niche,” after the software told him that “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal,” according to Wired …

 

 

Despite MAGA fans making him rich, he still looks down on them, calling them “super-dumb.”

He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.

“The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people — like, super-dumb people. And they fall for it,” Sam said. …

“I was basically doing nothing,“ he said. “And it was just flooded with money.”

Hart’s profile on Instagram — which requires creators to disclose whether their content is AI-generated —was taken down by the platform in February for “fraudulent” activity, the outlet said.

The fruits of globalism

The fruits of globalism. By Michael A. Arouet.

Dear Germans, I have some bad news for you.

You do not have enough children to pay for your pensions and healthcare, and one third of those you do have are on a straight path to permanent welfare.

Good luck with your future.

And:

Wow, this chart is simply unreal.

Did Canada join the European Union, or did it decide to deindustrialize on its own?

But net-zero! Canadians voted enthusiastically for it.

More:

Wow, it’s quite an achievement for Canada to have had even lower growth than Germany during the last decade.

Germany has done almost everything humanly possible to ruin its economy. How has Canada been able to beat that?

Germany and Australia are probably the two countries that have most enthusiastically embraced net-zero (Canada is not far behind). Australia has had shrinking per-capita GDP for several years, but scores positive GDP growth because we have easily the highest legal immigration rate of any western nation.

Bonus:

I will never understand left-green politicians who seriously assume that they are somehow smarter than the free market.

Why do they do that?

Speaking of Germany and socialists:

Just out of curiosity, why does Volkswagen never share a founder picture?

A reader adds:

We talk about “them” doing this to western countries, wrecking them socially/culturally and economically, especially over the last 20 to 30 years.

But enough of the voters voted for it; on one hand, they’ve believed the BS about global warming and failed to understand it was a trick to control and extract wealth from them, and, on the other hand, “refugees welcome” and suicidal empathy.

“They” have done what they’ve done because they were in a position to do so. For example, look at the disaster now unfolding in Spain: Sanchez didn’t seize power in a coup, he’s there because enough people voted for him and his fellow travelers.

The problem with climate change

The problem with climate change. From a comment by Peter Hague on another topic (the mostly illusory advantages of launching rockets from the equator):

Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it”.

This unfortunate fact is a boon for cranks, hack journalists, self-described skeptics and con artists. All I can do is put in the work here, and hope that the truth can slowly make it’s way through the public consciousness and disarm the blowhards.

This applies to both the believers in the carbon dioxide theory of global warming and to the skeptics. In the meantime, the predictions of the warmers keep failing, despite all the games with rewriting historical records, measuring air temperatures, and measuring ocean temperatures.

The bullshit is so bad on both sides that it will take simple empiricism to break through.