China is still the coal furnace of the world

China is still the coal furnace of the world. By Joanne Nova.

This is the latest graph of coal plants in operation in the world today.

Luckily there is one place on Earth where carbon emissions are irrelevant.

While most CO2 emissions cause wars, droughts, and kill eagles, there are some CO2 emissions that just create refrigerators, so nobody minds. …

The UN has met every year for twenty-eight years to badger everyone to stop using coal to appease the Goddess of Trace Gases and Weird Weather — all while China became the coal furnace of the world.

Or perhaps The UN met every year, so China could do exactly that? Lord above, imagine if the bureaucratic diplomats of the West could be bought off so easily by trophies, trinkets and photo-opportunities? Or perhaps they were naively trapped in cheap honeypot schemes? As a trade strategy, it would be a bargain. And it surely was.

Somehow life on Earth depends on Extinction Rebellion protestors, but they can’t seem to find the Chinese Embassy.

Michael Arouet:

While the US understands that energy independence means prosperity and geopolitical security, Europe continues to sacrifice its economy, security and relevance on the altar of the green Net Zero religion.

 

 

But Germany was tricked into going backwards:

 

Meanwhile, evidence of actual global warming beyond a continuation of the warming trend since 1650 remains mighty scarce.

Average of 125 years of mostly rural USA weather stations
(with unadjusted data, as measured )

Harvey Weinstein Says #MeToo Was Just Greedy Women Chasing Payouts: ‘March to the Money Pile’

Harvey Weinstein Says #MeToo Was Greedy Women Chasing Payouts: ‘March to the Money Pile’. By Maer Roshan at The Hollywood Reporter.

From an interview with Harvey Weinstein in jail at Rikers.

At the apex of his career, Harvey mostly got a pass for appalling behavior. He was an A-list Hollywood producer with his mitts on magazines, theater, publishing and politics. He palled around with prime ministers and presidents. Then, in 2017, a set of blockbuster stories — in The New York Times and The New Yorker — revealed his history of sexual harassment and abuse, precipitating his dizzying fall from grace. …

His six years of incarceration had failed to inspire any genuine contrition. The world may have branded him a monster, but Harvey still considers himself a victim — crucified for a bygone era of Hollywood sins. When pressed, he concedes that his behavior may have been loutish, pathetic and even abusive. But he insists he’s no rapist — just an oversexed schmuck who made some stupid moves and accidentally launched a global social movement.

Unfortunately for him, three successive juries have disagreed. Since the first news stories appeared, close to 100 women have come forward to publicly accuse Weinstein of sexual misconduct …

Q: There are dozens and dozens of women who tell a variation of the same basic story. You followed them to their hotel rooms or trapped them in yours. You forced them to have sex with you. You got furious or retaliated when they turned you down. You claim that none of this is true. But what accounts for the uniformity of all these reports? Why do you think all these people are so willing to lie about you?

Weinstein: For a lot of reasons. But mainly because there’s money involved. You know, one woman got half a million dollars. Another got paid $500,000. A third got $3 million. All anyone had to do to walk off with a check was fill out a form that said I sexually assaulted them. So they filled it out, and the insurance company eventually paid out tens of millions of dollars. And Disney, too — Disney didn’t want a public fight, so they just paid people to go away. It becomes a bandwagon effect. People can say anything they want about me, and it’s in the public record. But very few of these stories have been litigated in court. …

Did I make a pass at some of these women unsuccessfully? Did I overplay my hand? Yes. Was I pushy or overly seductive? Yes to all of that. Look, I should never have gone out with the people I went out with. I was married to a fantastic woman who had no idea what I was doing. I lied all the time. I improperly used my staff to hide these things. But did I ever sexually assault a woman? No. I never did that. …

The thing I was doing wrong was not sexual assault. It was cheating on my wife. I was desperate to keep that secret from her. I did not want Disney to find out. I did everything to protect myself from that kind of scandal. …

I didn’t push anybody. I didn’t physically move anybody. …

I’m just going to say Rosanna Arquette, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie — they just exaggerated. They wanted to be part of the club. And they destroyed me. …

When Alyssa Milano said “Me too,” she didn’t mean #MeToo about Harvey. She said “Me too,” and then everybody said #MeToo about me. Every woman I was with, every friend that I had. It was a march to the money pile.

So twentieth century. Now that society is largely feminized, looking funny at a woman can be a crime if she doesn’t like it, and regret rape is rape. Objectivity and proof? No, so last century.

Why the media now loves Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly — anti-MAGA

Why the media now loves Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly — anti-MAGA! By Scott Pinsker at PJ Media.

The most overrepresented, overhyped, and overexposed political bloc in today’s mainstream media is… any guesses?

I’ll give you a hint: They’re in the Republican Party (more or less). And the amount of media attention they’re receiving is nothing short of extraordinary. In all their years, they’ve never received better press!

And in a weird, inexplicable coincidence, their business model directly depends on being noticed.

Not liked or loved. Not supported, trusted, or believed. And certainly not “winning hearts and minds” — because so far, they’ve failed to influence almost anyone. …

But it’s a simple financial formula:

  1. Notice them.
  2. Click on them.
  3. Ca-ching!

I’m speaking of those MAGA-adjacent podcasters, “influencers,” and politicos — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steve Bannon, and Thomas Massie — who’ve sided with the Democrats to oppose the Iran War, along with the MAGA members they represent. …

Would the media lie?

And in another weird, inexplicable coincidence, the mainstream media is trumpeting their Iran objections with gusto …

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

Given this vast degree of media attention, you’d get the impression that the Republican Party has fractured — and the MAGA movement was embroiled in a bitter civil war. After all, virtually every major media outlet in our country has aired the grievances of Carlson, Fuentes, Owens, and Kelly — many more than once. Why, anti-war sentiment must be rising!

But the trouble is, it’s just not true.

Only 11% of Republicans oppose the Iran War. An overwhelming majority — 85% — support President Trump.

And Republicans who self-identify as MAGA support the Iran War by an even WIDER margin: 90% support it; just 5% oppose.

Which means, most of the Republicans who oppose the Iran War were “Never Trumpers” in the first place — and NOT part of the Make America Great Again movement.

Self-appointed grifters:

So how the heck did self-appointed MAGA spokesmen like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Marjorie Taylor Greene get this much media attention when they only represent 5% of the MAGA movement? (Not 5% of the American people or 5% of the Republican Party, mind you — just 5% of the MAGA movement!)

How does that make any sense?

It’s because they’re telling you a story that the media wants you to believe.

The mainstream media hates Donald Trump with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. …

Carlson and Company are simply a means to an end; a blunt weapon to hurt the president and shatter our movement. It’s why they’re receiving press so ridiculously disproportionate to the small size of their bloc. …

Anti-war “influencers” (and their 5% of MAGA) are the most overhyped, overrepresented, and overexposed bloc in America today. They’re everywhere. Which makes them seem far bigger and more influential than they actually are.

And that was the media’s goal all along.

Pam Bondi, US Attorney General, Moves to Military Housing Because of Threats.

Pam Bondi, US Attorney General, Moves to Military Housing Because of Threats. By Glenn Thrush at the NYT.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has quietly relocated to one of several military bases in the Washington area where other Trump administration officials also live, after facing threats from drug cartels and critics of her actions in handling the Jeffrey Epstein case, according to people familiar with the situation.

Ms. Bondi moved from an apartment in the city within the past month in response to an array of threats flagged to her staff by federal law enforcement, these people said, including an uptick in criticism of Ms. Bondi, and threats relayed by investigators. …

Several  Trump officials have had to move due to threats:

Ms. Bondi is the latest administration official to move into heavily guarded quarters at military facilities in or near the nation’s capital after citing danger from criminals, adversaries overseas and protesters.

Other officials who have relocated include Stephen Miller, the president’s top domestic policy adviser and the architect of his hard-line immigration policy; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Kristi Noem, the exiting homeland security secretary; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Lefties using jury nullification to subvert US immigration law

Lefties using jury nullification to subvert US immigration law. By Thomas Catenacci at The Washington Free Beacon.

A left-wing activist group is teaching liberals in Washington, D.C., and “across the United States” how to increase their chances of serving as jurors on cases brought by the Trump Department of Justice so they can undermine its chances of securing convictions, training materials reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

Freedom Trainers, whose fiscal sponsor is the George Soros-funded group Community Change, is working to make “jury nullification” — the practice of voting against a conviction even if the defendant broke the law — a go-to legal weapon for the Left. Its sessions and training materials, reviewed by the Free Beacon, show how the group teaches “committed people” to gum up federal prosecutions.

The group tells attendees to keep their addresses current to ensure they receive summons. Then, during the jury selection process, it advises them to “Never mention jury nullification,” “Don’t signal an agenda,” and “say you’ll listen to the evidence before forming conclusions.” Once selected, the group tells its trainees to vote “not guilty” for any reason. …

The trainings walk activists through how they can increase their odds of both receiving a jury summons and being selected for the jury.

The group emphasizes, for example, that activists should dress neutrally, give brief answers, and say they will listen to the evidence before forming conclusions during jury selection. They should also never mention jury nullification before or during selection.

Wow! Think of all the virtue points a leftie on the jury would score by getting a guilty immigrant off. Their friends would be so envious!

These trends always show up in Australia before long.

Iran Boasts It Has Destroyed Hundreds Of US Missiles With Its Buildings

Iran Boasts It Has Destroyed Hundreds Of US Missiles With Its Buildings. By The Babylon Bee.

Despite losing dozens of members of its leadership, the embattled Ayatollah’s regime remained defiant while taunting the world that it had successfully wiped out hundreds — if not thousands — of U.S. missiles, drones, and bombs by blocking them with buildings and military bases throughout the country.

“The wreckage of their bombs can be seen strewn throughout the rubble of our cities,” new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a recorded address. “They thought that their missiles were formidable, but they completely disintegrate when they engulf our buildings in great explosions. When the smoke clears, you can see that the bombs are no more. When you look out across our leveled cities, unobstructed by any buildings, you can clearly see that there are no missiles in sight. Checkmate, America.” …

At publishing time, the Iranian government had also released a statement boasting that its navy had gone to the bottom of the sea to avoid detection.

 

This however is real, propaganda being served up in Iran:

 

The West will turn into South Africa

The West will turn into South Africa. By Geiger Capital.

Curtis Yarvin [aka Moldbug] says the West has “no balls” now and will simply turn into South Africa…

“Americans and Europeans will not resist the mass immigration and population replacement. You know, the thought that they will grab their muskets or whatever. It won’t happen. Won’t happen at all. What will happen is exactly what happened in South Africa.

They will just acknowledge that they’ve lost their power and their country forever. And then they will sit quietly in their houses and build more and more barbed wire and electric fences until finally they are exterminated in one big pogrom. That’s the future. That’s what will happen to your children.”

 

 

Speaking of thoughtful philosophers with a good track record:

 

Michel Houellebecq:

“That’s how a #civilization dies; without worries, without danger or drama and with very little carnage; a civilization just dies of weariness, of self-disgust.”

Erick:

Americans or Europeans didn’t suddenly “lose their balls.”

For at least the last 60 years people in these countries have been slowly trained to think a certain way. Movies, television, universities, and media constantly communicate what is normal, moral, and acceptable. Culture shapes the framework people use to interpret the world.

When the culture itself teaches people that certain reactions are wrong, immoral, or even unthinkable, most people won’t resist. Not because they’re weak, but because the framework in their heads tells them not to.

Some people can step outside that framework if they think about it deeply. But it’s obvious that cultural groupthink is real.

Capitalism arose in Britain first because there was no standing army to enforce the will of the parasitic overlords

Capitalism arose in Britain first because there was no standing army to enforce the will of the parasitic overlords. By Martin Durkin at Gorilla Science.

Capitalism didn’t arise on the European continent for another 400 years, after Britain had already become a rich superpower. This explains why the Anglo tradition is for liberty and democracy, whereas everywhere else tends to a greater degree to autocracy and socialism.

 

 

 

This history is vital to understanding the world, but is never taught today. Naturally, the left hates it.

The U.S. went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon

The U.S. went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon. By Haviv Rettig Gur, in The Free Press.

Across the world, from Brazil to Beijing, London to Karachi, the argument is the same: America is fighting Israel’s war. But this isn’t true. And the confusion matters …

This is not a war about Israel. This is not a war for Israel’s sake. Israel is a beneficiary, a capable and willing local partner, but it is not the reason America is in this fight. America is playing a much bigger game, about more than what happens in the Middle East. …

This isn’t one war, but two.

The small war — the Middle East:

There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis: All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighborhood.

The big war — USA vs China:

But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out: whether the American-led global order survives, or whether China displaces it. Every significant American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars to the posture in the Pacific, is ultimately a move on this board. …

America is in this fight because of China. Specifically, it is about dismantling the most significant Chinese forward base outside of East Asia.

Iran stepped up from the small war to the big war when it allied with China:

Iran, for most of its history as an adversary of the United States, existed only on the smaller board. It was a headache. It was a regional destabilizer. It funded terrorism, harassed shipping, threatened America’s allies, and kept the Middle East expensive and unpredictable. But it was not, in any direct sense, a threat to American primacy on the global stage. It was Israel’s problem, the Gulf states’ problem, and only tangentially Washington’s.

That changed when Iran made one of the most consequential strategic miscalculations of the century. …

Squeezed by decades of American sanctions and increasingly isolated, Iran turned to China as its economic lifeline. The relationship deepened rapidly. Today, roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports go to China, processed through a network of Chinese refineries that operate beyond the reach of American sanctions enforcement. That oil revenue supplies around a quarter of Iran’s budget, a huge portion of which is spent on Iran’s military forces. The Iranian military is thus funded, in significant part, by Chinese purchases.

Without Beijing, the regime cannot pay its security forces, cannot subsidize basic goods, and would soon face the kind of internal collapse that its own ideology has spent 40 years trying to prevent. In other words, Iran has become — has made itself — utterly dependent on China.

China, for its part, was not being charitable. It was being strategic. Iranian oil, sold cheaply because Tehran has no other buyers, has helped Beijing build a strategic petroleum reserve exceeding a billion barrels, enough to sustain the Chinese economy for roughly a hundred days in the event of a naval blockade. China’s single greatest vulnerability is the American Navy’s ability to interdict its energy imports, especially at vulnerable choke points like the Malacca Straits. Iranian oil, flowing outside American oversight, was a direct hedge against that vulnerability. (So, by the way, was Venezuela’s, another U.S. operation that was ultimately about containing China.) …

China was also arming Iran with systems specifically designed to threaten commercial and American military assets. Reports emerged in late February of a near-finalized deal to supply Iran with supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3 and engineered to evade the Aegis defense systems deployed on American carrier strike groups. China was replacing Iranian government and military software with closed Chinese systems, hardening Iran against CIA and Mossad cyber operations. Joint naval exercises between China, Russia, and Iran in the Straits of Hormuz were becoming regular events, building real-time operational familiarity between the three navies. Iran had switched from the GPS system to the Chinese BeiDou system. And Iran was providing China with the port at Jask, as part of China’s “string of pearls” base system in the Indian Ocean.

The picture that emerges from all of this is of a Chinese forward base, a linchpin of the country’s naval architecture; cyber efforts; an economic Belt and Road influence program — every element of Chinese power projection and empire-building — positioned at the throat of the global oil supply, armed with weapons designed to penetrate advanced American defenses and kill American sailors, and embedded in a strategic architecture whose explicit purpose is to constrain American military freedom in any future conflict over Taiwan.

When Iran began to look like that, it stopped being Israel’s problem and became America’s.

Pretty obvious when it’s pointed out. I wonder why the legacy media haven’t mentioned it?

Iran Strikes: Day 9

Iran Strikes: Day 9. By Lawrence Person, who does a great job explaining why he presents the military news from Iran:

One reason I do these updates is that the vast majority of MSM reporting is of such poor quality. It’s all government talking heads said this or critics of Trump said that. In other words, lazy reporting crap no one cares about.

Back before American journalists became self-licking ice cream cones, war reporting used to include maps, unit movements, logistics, combat reports from journalists embedded with U.S. units, etc. The BBC still seems to do a little of that, but I’m not seeing that from American outlets, maybe because it’s hard work. They don’t even seem to be bothering to tell ChatGPT to do it for them.

Hence these roundups to fill the gap.

Some excepts from today:

 

To many, it seems like an end-of-days scenario: Qatar and Israel on the same team.

Who would have thought? In September, Israel attacked in Qatar, targeting terrorist leaders the Gulf state was housing. But here we are. After five days of war with Iran, the Iranians have succeeded in putting Israel and Qatar on the same team — to say nothing of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia — all countries targeted over the past five days by Iranian missiles and drones.

By some estimates, Iran has fired more missiles and drones at Gulf states combined than at Israel.

What Iran may have done is something Israel has long struggled to achieve diplomatically: place Israel and several Sunni Arab states on the same side of a regional conflict. By striking the Gulf states directly, Tehran has widened the war in a way that forces governments across the region to reconsider where their interests truly lie.

Aircraft carriers:

Having two aircraft carriers launching strikes at Iran evidently wasn’t enough, as the USS George H. W. Bush is now poised to join the party, joining the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Gerald R. Ford. Obviously you need ships named after Republican presidents to win wars. If you had the USS Barack Obama, it could only drop pallets of cash, and the USS Bill Clinton could only hit on underage Iranian girls…

You did it first:

Since Iran has hit the oil facilities on Persian gulf nations, Israel hits oil storage facilities near Tehran….

Kurds:

For all the talk of Kurdish forces entering Iran, Trump has said he’s told them not to. But we have numerous reports of Israeli jets hitting targets like IRCG posts along the border and police stations in Iranian Kurdistan.

Etc. etc. See the link.

Iranian Imbroglio

Iranian Imbroglio. By John Carter.

Yet again?

Certainly this has happened before. Trump has bombed Iran’s nuclear research facilities a few months ago, and assassinated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qasem Soleimani a few years ago.

 

Low level war been going on for 47 years

 

Every time this kind of thing happens there are panicked shouts that thermonuclear Ragnarok is imminent, alongside outraged cries that Zion Don has betrayed MAGA by engaging in precisely the foreign interventionism that he repudiated, that he has been captured by the Neocohens, and that We Will Not Die For Israel.

In each case, nothing much happened. Iran raised the red flag of revenge, or the gold flag of implacable annihilation, or the black flag of this time we really mean it, all of which amounted in practice to a few rockets being fired ineffectually in Israel’s general direction, to be absorbed by an Iron Dome that really seems to work quite well. There was no World War III. There were no boots on the ground.

Israel?

As I saw someone observe recently, We Will Not Die For Israel has become the groyper version of the Handmaid’s Tale: no one is actually asking anyone to die for Israel; there are no imminent plans for mass conscription; therefore protestations that one will resist a non-existent draft amount to the same kind of lurid masturbatory fantasy as declarations that one would never, pant, allow oneself to be confined in a harem, pant pant, and turned into, pant pant pant, breeding stock.

Maybe that will change. Maybe a year from now I’ll be ruefully eating those words, as American boys are being shipped off by their hundreds of thousands to run around blinded by Russian electronic countermeasures in the cold mountain passes of the Zagros, getting picked off by snipers and shredded by Chinese drones.

But I doubt it. …

None of this should be taken to imply that Israel hasn’t played a massive role in orchestrating and precipitating this war. They clearly have. Marco Rubio let this slip when he admitted that part of the reason the US attacked when they did was that Israel had signalled that they were going to attack with or without America’s blessing or assistance. …

Republicans more sensitive to antisemitism than anti-white prejudice:

Republicans who shrug off open anti-white bigotry systematically directed against America’s core population in essentially all of its universities react with fury to campus anti-Semitism, threatening to withhold funding from any institutions that tolerate hurt Jewish feelings….

Mossad trick or wishful thinking?

There’s an unconfirmed rumour that, as a parting shot, the Mossad wiped the morality police’s databases, so that they no longer had any record of which of their women have a habit of letting their hair down in public. …

How many in Iran hate the Mullahs?

If the reactions of Iranian expatriates living in the West are anything to go by, the Iranian people — particularly the Persians — loathe the mullahs. They’ve been celebrating in the streets, flying the variant of the Iranian flag with the lion instead of the ridiculous Islamic scimitar onion.

But then, is their reaction representative of public opinion in Iran itself? Expats are self-selected to be dissatisfied with their home country; that’s why they’re expats in the first place.

On the other hand, the protests that rocked Tehran in January are certainly indicative of widespread discontent, and one constantly hears that the Iranian people — at least the urban, educated portion — barely tolerate the theocracy. Zoroastrianism is rumoured to be making a comeback amongst Iranian youth, as a repudiation of Islamic mind-control via conscious reconnection with their deep ethnoreligion. …

Iran, like the West, suffers from low fertility, with a Total Fertility Rate of around 1.5. This is probably downstream of Iran’s high rate of female education: well over half of university students are women (peaking at around 70% in the 2010s), and over half of Iranian women enrol in higher education. …

The mullahs are a council of conservative old men holding onto power over a restively bucking youth bulge via the judicious application of welfare with one white-knuckled grip and terror with the other. They are acutely conscious that if their hand grows too heavy they will be overthrown by youngsters who barely tolerate the imposition of religious ideals that they do not share…

Air power alone cannot conquer a country:

So far the war has been entirely an air war, and American air power remains unassailable. On the first day the bombing was conducted with B-2 stealth bombers. Within a few days, Iran’s air defences had been so thoroughly broken that the USAF was able to send in its refurbished WWII-era B-52s, which have giant Las Vegas style neon signs for radar cross sections. Zero American aircraft have been lost. Iran’s skies are American skies, from which America can bomb Iranian facilities at their leisure. The pilots must be enjoying the hell out of themselves. …

Regime change?

The Iranian people may well hate the Iranian regime, but this does not mean that they will rise up against the regime when America and Israel are bombing them. For one thing, the Iranian people already rose up, and were slaughtered. For another, it is one thing to take to the streets during peace time, when one can plausibly claim to be a revolutionary motivated by liberal ideals of humanitarian justice or whatever; it is quite another to take to the streets when the enemy’s munitions are blowing up your country, and the government’s inevitable argument that you are all nothing more than the enemy’s traitorous catspaws will inevitably carry the day. …

So it seems unlikely that the Iranian people will revolt against the Islamic Revolution, at least as long as the bombings continue. The Trump administration seems to tacitly agree: initial declarations that one of the goals was regime change appear to have been quietly dropped, or at least de-emphasized. …

No sign of the much-threatened sleeper agents:

Over the years we’ve heard a lot about Iranian sleeper agents infiltrating the US, ready to sabotage US infrastructure or initiate terrorist attacks. So far none of that has happened …

Oil is already up to $100 a barrel, which is great news for countries whose economies depend on oil exports (such as Canada and Iran, not that it will do Iran much good), but not so great for everyone else. Whether prices rise more and bring on a global recession depends on how long the Straits of Hormuz remain closed. Currently the US Navy is planning to escort tankers through the straits.

UK and Canada out of the loop:

There are rumours that the US is going to try and steal the business of insuring global shipping from the City of London, which has dominated it for centuries. These rumours imply that the one of the advantages enjoyed by Lloyd’s of London was back-channel intelligence connections to the American security state, which have recently been closed.

Certainly America’s erstwhile partners in the United Kingdom appear to have been taken completely by surprise, suggesting that Washington is no longer sharing intelligence with Five Eyes partners it now views as adversarial and compromised by foreign influence. I’m sure that had nothing to do with Westminster inviting the Chinese to build the world’s largest embassy in the heart of their city, or giving away the Chagos Islands and its strategic Indian Ocean airbase to a Chinese client state.

Canada was similarly blindsided, which surely has nothing to do with our parliament being heavily infiltrated by Chinese intelligence, or with our prime minister having announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with the People’s Republic. …

A Eurabian Union will not be a reliable ally, as the sympathies of Muslims will naturally lie in the Dar al-Islam rather than the Dar al-Harb. Already in the Yookay there are mounted Islamic vigilante patrols chasing down Persians protesting in favour of the air strikes. …

Young Americans:

Much of Trump’s base, particularly the younger voters, are furious: they elected him to deport a hundred million people, not to start another pointless desert war for Sheldon Adelson.

Attempts to paint the mullahs as barbaric reprobates for forcing women to wear hijabs, signing off on marriages to 9-year-old girls, or forcing gay men to get sex change operations fall quite flat when young American men are living in the romantic wreckage of MeToo’s male purdah, American schools have been trooning American children for a decade as a matter of government policy, and not a single member of the American elite has been arrested in connection with the Epstein files. Younger voters are in a bad mood in any case due to the economy: however well the stock market is doing, however much manufacturing is reshoring to America, it doesn’t seem to be turning into jobs yet. …

Trump is hogtied at home, but Caesar abroad:

Trump’s mandate was to fix America’s domestic problems, not embark on new foreign adventures. …

Perhaps there’s a domestic upside in this, though. It has not escaped notice that Trump can stride across the globe like Zeus, but is forced into the role of a fiddling Nero when at his burning home, were he’s tied down like Gulliver by a thousand judicial strings, while a recalcitrant GOP sits on his chest, slow-walking his every reform.

Patience with this state of dysfunctional affairs of state has become as thin as the onion-skin paper of an old pocket Bible, and a lot of American voters are carrying that Bible full of enumerated grievances around in their back pockets everywhere they go. If a Caesar is effective abroad, how effective could a Caesar be at home? Many are asking this question. …

Prognosis:

As furious as MAGA is about Iran, it’s worth emphasizing that we’ve been here before. No one wants ‘boots on the ground’, but there’s nothing Americans like more than watching their air force pound the ever-living snot out of someone.

Trump’s style so far has been more gun-boat diplomacy and less hearts-and-minds nation-building. He seems to prefer the punitive expedition to the occupation, and if he holds to that pattern — and, just as importantly, if it does not spin out of control into catastrophe – it’s likely that voters will forget all about it by November, which is forever and a day away in news cycle terms.

It also shouldn’t be forgotten that a huge part of Trump’s base are not angry young radicals who want to burn it all down, but grumpy old boomers with Cold War nostalgia for Top Gun training montages and a chip on their shoulders that’s been itching since 1979. That part of his base is loving the bombardment porn.

Islam conquered Iran (Persia) centuries ago. It would be nice if it were liberated — like Spain in 1490. But that’s very unlikely.

Iran is a religious state, which gives it superpowers?

Iran is a religious state, which gives it superpowers? By Chris Mitchell in The Australian.

Commentators in Australia discuss Iran as a rational state rather than a time capsule of religious ideas. Yet those religious ideas underpin the strategies of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: hatred of Jews, the embrace of martyrdom, and rejection of modernity. …

International law:

In Australia, the ABC could not report what was really happening, focused instead on whether various attacks on Iran and its proxies complied with international law.

Why? The national broadcaster appears to abhor Trump and Netanyahu more than it does a state that has financed terror around the world, including antisemitic attacks in Australia last year. …

Resistance:

Key to understanding Iran is the idea of “resistance”, something young Australian students and journalists who think they are speaking truth to power unthinkingly support but only because they have no idea what “resistance” means to an Islamist. …

The Arabic word “muqawama” means resistance. It is both “’the Islamic Republic’s greatest source of resilience — and the engine of its unravelling,” [Times of Israel’s political correspondent Haviv Rettig Gur] argues.

“When used by the leaders of Iran or Hezbollah or Hamas or the Houthis … (it) refers to a sustained, never-ending campaign of violence accompanied by a willingness to absorb catastrophic levels of damage. As the damage sustained to one’s own polity grows, so the sanctity and religious meaning grows with it.”

Sacrifice is the ultimate weapon the weak can use against the powerful. Rettig Gur outlines the role of a Syrian preacher, Izzedine al-Qassam, who died in 1935 as a martyr outside Jenin in the north of the West Bank shouting: “This is Jihad, victory or martyrdom.”

His death sparked the 1935-38 Arab revolt against British rule and is emblematic for Hamas which named its key combat force the Al-Qassam Brigades and its most common rocket the Qassam.

Into this legend 1960s Palestinian intellectuals added Mao’s theory of guerilla warfare: “A militarily inferior force embedded in a sympathetic population could exhaust a technologically superior enemy simply by refusing to be eliminated.” Sound like Hamas in tunnels? …

Rettig Gur argues Hamas and Iran’s Ayatollahs believe: “You do not need to win … You need to make the cost of occupying you unbearable in moral, political and economic terms.” …

But is religious-level resistance ultimately self-defeating?

Like Russian communism, the system contains the seeds of its own destruction.

The educated young of Iran see their rulers enriching themselves while Iran pays for weapons for Iran’s terror proxies.

Iran, with 93 million people, an educated population and enormous natural resources, has a smaller GDP than tiny Israel which has a population of only nine million and few natural resources. This is why Hamas’s October 7 pogrom was timed to disrupt the Abraham Accords negotiation process.

Normalisation of relations between Israel and the Gulf States would be a disaster for the Mullahs: Iran’s domestic protest movement is more interested in a better life than a better martyrdom.

Students chanting “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon – my life for Iran”, and “They take our bread to buy rockets for Lebanon”, know a lot more about real resistance than the keffiyeh-wearing pro-Palestine mobs here each weekend.

Funny how the media never point how how flagrantly the West’s opponents violate “international law.” Somehow “international law” only ever impedes or constrains the West, never it enemies.

NDIS Ghost Towns in Lakemba, Sydney

NDIS Ghost Towns in Lakemba, Sydney. By Pete Z.

1,300 NDIS providers in Lakemba. That’s 1 in every 13 people.

So @DrewPavlou and I went there to see it for ourselves to both Lakemba and Bankstown. The supposed hub of NDIS providers.

Yet when we showed up… almost every single one was a ghost town.

 

 

Curious. This is presumably the video we mentioned earlier here:

Pete visited the infamous NDIS provider with a $250,000 GTR parked out the front and they chased him down the street.

 

Backgrounder on Lakemba:

Religion: Islam is the predominant religion, practiced by 68.3% of the population …

The top ancestries in Lakemba (2021) are Bengali/Bangladeshi (18.7%), Indian (10.7%), and Australian (8.2%), with notable overrepresentation of South Asian and Middle Eastern groups compared to regional averages.

Tony Burke’s electorate.

Backgrounder on the NDIS:

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is a government-funded program in Australia that provides individualised support to people with permanent and significant disability, enabling them to live more independently and participate in the community.

Fraud in the NDIS is a serious and growing concern, with estimates suggesting up to $6 billion annually may be misused, including by organised crime. Fraud involves intentional deception to gain financial benefit, such as claiming for services not provided, overcharging, using fake identities, or creating “ghost” participants.

Commenters:

Check out Mirrabooka in WA. 1 in 9 NDIS, It’s our Lakemba. Not an Aussie in sight. …

Looks like Middle Eastern Muslim population has the highest disabled people in Australia….

Can you ask them to relocate some to more rural/regions? We can’t get enough funding to cover my transport costs. 100kms of driving.

If this is like the Somali day care ripoffs in Minnesota, the center-left party might be getting donations from the recipients of NDIS money. Just a possibility, but will our media properly investigate? Of course not, they are also of the left.

hat-tip Peter S.