War crimes, or Marxist humiliation ceremony?

War crimes, or Marxist humiliation ceremony?

Reuters:

Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, was arrested at Sydney Airport and charged with five counts of war-crime murder over the killing of unarmed Afghan civilians while deployed in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.

 

Other than to create a public spectacle for the media, why was Ben Roberts Smith arrested at the airport after getting off a domestic flight?

 

John Konrad:

He won a Victoria Cross, the equivalent of a Medal of Honor, for killing Taliban. Now, two decades later, he’s arrested for killing Taliban. …

Something is really bothering me about the Ben Roberts-Smith case. …

On one hand, this prosecution stinks of liberal bias.

Out of thousands of potential war crimes cases the social justice warrior police chief could have pursued, she picked THE most decorated soldier on the entire continent. That isn’t justice. That’s a public humiliation ritual.

On the other hand, I do believe actual war criminals should stand trial regardless of rank or honors. And I know what’s coming: “John, Roberts-Smith already lost the 2023 defamation case. Justice Besanko found he committed the murders.”

Yes. On the balance of probabilities. 51 percent. That’s the civil standard. Criminal conviction requires 99 percent.

The same fragile evidence that barely cleared a coin flip is now supposed to send a man to prison for life. …

The Roberts-Smith allegations are 20 years old. And here’s what the Brereton Inquiry, for all its 510 witnesses and four years of work, could never get:

  • No crime scene access. The Taliban didn’t let investigators into Uruzgan.
  • No Afghan witnesses interviewed.
  • No secured scene.
  • No blood-spatter analysis.
  • No DNA
  • No autopsies.
  • No recovered bodies.
  • No weapons tied to victims.

The investigators themselves admitted they “lacked access to Afghan crime scenes and were missing the physical evidence that would normally anchor a murder prosecution.”

So what’s left? Memory. Twenty-year-old memory from men in the fog of war.

The science is unambiguous. Countless research studies confirms memory is reconstructive: later suggestion, media exposure, and repeated questioning distort it. This is the textbook misinformation effect.

Confidence and accuracy decouple within months, let alone decades. Studies on soldiers who suffer PTSD show the gaps get even larger.

I admittedly don’t know 🇦🇺 law but US courts admit decades-old testimony but warn juries it is inherently fragile, not scientific proof. Australia is treating it as load-bearing concrete.

The media says “20 former soldiers testified against him.” Fine. Was all their testimony actually against him? How clear was it? Did 20 people watch him murder a civilian in broad daylight? And even if they did, you still have to prove the dead man wasn’t Taliban. In Uruzgan. In 2009. Without a body. …

And here’s the question nobody in Canberra wants asked: Why is the trigger-puller in the dock while the officers who wrote the rules of engagement, approved the missions, and signed the after-action reports keep their pensions?

The Victoria Cross winner hangs. The chain of command walks. Past “War crime” cases with more hard evidence remain “unsolved”.

That isn’t accountability. That’s a scapegoat ritual.

You do not get a Victoria Cross just for killing. You get it for extraordinary gallantry, valour, self-sacrifice & devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy.

And here is what Australia just told every soldier watching: the reward for a VC is fame which will make you a target for future show trials built on 20-year-old memories, prosecuted by a police chief with no combat but more ribbons on her uniform than you.

If murder can be proven without hard evidence decades later, that isn’t justice even if he is guilty. Proof of guilt matters.

That’s a Marxist humiliation ceremony leading to national strategic disarmament by lawfare.

Much hinges on the “definition” of civilian, and who gets to do the defining.

cdrslamandar:

I’m old enough to remember how Morant and Handcock became folk heroes in Australia.

This time though, it isn’t the British who are going after Diggers, it is their own government.

Also of note, the incident involving Morant et al took place in 1901. The trial took place just a few months later in 1902. During the trial, Boer forces attacked Pietersburg where the trial took place. Morant and the others were released, issued arms, and helped defend the town against the attack. There were denied a plea of condonation and were returned to confinement. The trail was finished in Feb. 1902, with Morant and Handcock were executed 18 hours later.

What is this generation doing?

It is 2026. The accused, who happens to be the most decorated Australian living veteran, was arrested for accusations dating back 16 and more years ago.

This isn’t justice in any way shape or form. This is something else altogether.

If he were to be charged, it should have been a decade and a half ago, at the latest.

They’ve already bankrupted him last year with legal fees in a defamation trial where he has been asked to pay $30 million dollars (Australian) in legal fees.

Craig Kelly:

Any decent Australian can only regard the arrest of a Victoria Cross recipient as a sad day for Australia on so many levels.

Yet somehow it brings a smirk to the faces of the worst of humanity — the most pathetic, contemptible, grossly snivelling leftists in our society. …

The bottom line is they’ve been brainwashed to hate Australia and hate our military — yet the very freedoms and prosperity they enjoy wouldn’t exist if it weren’t those things.

 

 

Stephen Neil:

Ben Roberts Smith represents the Ancien Regime. As a straight white Christian Anglo Australian war hero, he epitomises the oppressor class and is by definition a counter revolutionary and an ‘enemy of the people’ etc.

Peter Van Onselen in The Daily Mail:

The arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith has already become much more than a criminal proceeding.

It’s a political, cultural and institutional test, and the speed with which public figures rushed into their preferred camps highlights this. …

Much of the country has already split behind two rival instincts that are now hardening almost beyond persuasion. Even Elon Musk weighed in on social media overnight. …

[Pauline Hanson] casts Roberts-Smith not as a defendant facing grave charges, but as a symbol of a broader betrayal — a decorated soldier cast aside by timid elites and agenda driven journalists. Even abandoned by the state itself and its institutions, once they took from him what they wanted. …

Greens senator David Shoebridge posted a screenshot of an article about the arrests, simply writing ‘Good’ alongside it.

$300 million was spent on the investigation of Roberts-Smith.

Color me skeptical. I’ve no doubt that Ben Roberts-Smith was sometimes uncouth and certainly not woke, and a rough man when required. But he was a very effective soldier — just the sort of man the woke lefties hate.

Look at the photos above. Who would you want on your team — him or her?

hat-tip Stephen Neil, David Archibald

Afghanistan: The Fevered Imaginations of the REMFs

Afghanistan: The Fevered Imaginations of the REMFs*. By David Archibald, from 20 November 2020.

Let’s start at the beginning. On 12th February, 2009, two Australian commandos on a night operation were fired upon by an Afghan in the doorway of his mud hut. Not wanting to be killed by an Afghan with an AK-47, the commandos threw grenades through the door of the mud hut to kill the insurgent. The grenades also killed half a dozen members of the insurgent’s family. A year later the Director of Military Prosecutions, a Brigadier Lyn McDade, brought charges against the commandos for defending themselves. The charges were dismissed by more senior military staff with a better grip on reality. The episode revealed Brigadier McDade to be a self-absorbed, useless person.

In early 2016, the then head of Australian special operations suspended operations and invited everyone under his command to write to him personally, and advise him of any unacceptable behaviour they had witnessed or conducted. He received 209 letters that contained no evidence of criminal behaviour.

Then things deteriorated. In March, 2016 the then head of the army, now chief of defence General Angus Campbell, commissioned a secret report on SAS culture from a Canberra sociologist, Dr Samantha Crompvoets.

 

Dr Samantha Crompvoets (from “Does the ACT have Australia’s most parent-friendly company?”). Nice head tilt.

 

Members of the SAS, past and present, were encouraged to contact Dr Crompvoets anonymously and tell tales of what went on in the regiment. Some of the lurid tales were included in her report as fact. For example:

The inquiry has found that there is credible information that junior soldiers were required by the patrol commanders to shoot a prisoner, in order to achieve that solider’s first kill, in a practice that was known as ‘blooding’. ‘Throwdowns would be placed with the body, and a ‘cover story’ was created for the purposes of operational reporting and to deflect scrutiny. This was reinforced with a code of silence.’

As several thousand Australian troops have rotated through Afghanistan, you would expect at least several hundred of those to have undergone the ‘blooding’ initiation. But strangely the just-released Brereton report doesn’t cite a single, individual case.

Another SAS practice cited by the Crompvoets report and repeated in the Brereton report is that:

‘after squirters (runners) were dealt with, Special Forces would then cordon off a whole village, taking men and boys to guesthouses, which are typically on the edge of a village. There they would be tied up and tortured by Special Forces, sometimes for days. When the Special Forces left, the men and boys would be found dead: shot in the head or blindfolded and with throats slit.

That passage implies that there should be a lot of villages in which only the women and girls survived a visit from Australian special forces. Such atrocities of that magnitude should be easy to track down but oddly the Brereton report does not include a single instance. …

The soldiers Dr Crompvoets was interviewing knew what she was about. They gave her what she wanted to hear, like Margaret Mead in Samoa. Old army lags can be quite entertaining and would have competed with each other to make up the most far-fetched stories for her report.

The fact that General Campbell swallowed the Crompvoets tales and Major General Brereton repeated them as fact in his report tells us that both these men are complete idiots. Normally that would be enough to dismiss the Brereton report as useless garbage, but it does give us an insight into the preoccupations of Australia’s high command.

The report says that the warrior culture in the SAS is a bad thing and that soldiers should be more caring and sharing. …

The senior officers of the ADF are jealous of the SAS because the SAS get most of the medals for gallantry. The person they hate most is Ben Roberts-Smith, because he earned both the Victoria Cross and the Medal for Gallantry by conspicuous acts of bravery. Relations between the Army and Mr Roberts-Smith started deteriorating years ago. …

Neither General Campbell or his pet fantasist Major General Brereton have seen combat, while Mr Roberts-Smith has wiped out multiple enemy machine gun positions in an afternoon. I know who I would believe.

The Federal Police will be given the job of prosecuting the servicemen mentioned in the Brereton report, but the effort will go the way of the McDade prosecutions. They will be dropped for lack of evidence [not dropped, as it turns out] because mostly they are complete fabrications.

* Term from the Vietnam era: Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers

Australian Liberal Party: Go woke, go broke

Australian Liberal Party: Go woke, go broke. By Craig Kelly.

In 2013, under Tony Abbott the Coalition held 45.5% of the primary vote.

Then the Liberals adopted one leftist policy after another. The geniuses said moving to the left was the key to electoral success.

They are now at 20%.

More than half of the Liberal party support has walked out the door and gone to One Nation.

 

National Newspoll, Mar 2026

 

The Left’s anger is proof that the counter-revolution is working.

The Left’s anger is proof that the counter-revolution is working. By Victor Davis Hanson., as described by M.A. Rothman.

We are watching 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫-𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝟗𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬. No president has attempted to fundamentally restructure the nature of American government since FDR’s New Deal in the mid-1930s. Trump is doing it — and the left is losing its mind because it’s working.

The scoreboard is hard to argue with.

  • Trump closed the border — something critics said couldn’t be done.
  • Over 𝟔𝟕𝟓,𝟎𝟎𝟎 illegal aliens have been deported, more than 400,000 of them charged with or convicted of crimes, and an estimated 𝟐.𝟐 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 have self-deported (Department of Homeland Security).
  • He declared war on DEI and is winning.
  • He barred biological males from women’s sports with full public support.
  • Universities are now rushing to cut deals — agreeing to stop gouging the federal government on grant surcharges exceeding 40-50%, to follow Supreme Court rulings on race-based preferences, and to restore free speech on campus.
  • Abroad, Iran no longer poses an immediate nuclear threat.
  • H-z-b, H-m-s, and the Houthis are in disarray or severely degraded.
  • There’s progress on Ukraine.
  • And the economic doomsayers? Wrong across the board….

In term one, [Trump] was surrounded by people who thought they knew better — Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Bill Barr, the anonymous op-ed writers — all either blocking or reinterpreting the MAGA agenda from within. This time, the team is aligned. And instead of treating progressive overreach as a set of individual policy disputes, Trump is going after 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐭𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟. That’s the part the left really can’t stomach.

  • PBS and NPR — defunded.
  • Cable and network news — facing court ramifications when they lie and defame.
  • Universities — hit with fines, endowment taxes, and scrutiny over a $𝟏.𝟕 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 student loan program, campus segregation in dorms and graduation ceremonies, and discriminatory hiring practices.
  • The Department of Education itself is being questioned.
  • And the foundational progressive assumption — that residency equals eventual citizenship — is being dismantled. If you came here illegally, you face deportation, even without a violent criminal record. …

The left holds power even when it doesn’t control a single branch of government. It does this through 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐮𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 — even though its actual constituency is only about 40% on most issues.

Trump is the first president to recognize that fighting the policies without dismantling the power structure that produces them is a losing game. …

𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲’𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐡𝐞’𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲’𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐡𝐞’𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭.

 

 

If Trump takes away enough of their nice government jobs, NGO funds, and easy government income (including fraud), “team left” will dissolve because it won’t be worth joining for the benefits. The parasites will have to dream up new schemes.

Some Europeans are ashamed of their leaders

Some Europeans are ashamed of their leaders. For example, Tim Soret:

As a European, I apologize to Americans for all the idiocy coming from our side.

You save your pilots no matter the cost.
You send humans to the moon.
You fight authoritarianism head-on.
It’s truly inspiring.

We’re on the wrong side of the moral equation.

Frankly I hope I can join your ranks one day.

I’m done with the morally smug, economically illiterate, declinist mindset here. We think we’re so cultured & so smart, but it’s mostly masturbatory.

Americans keep demonstrating their uniquely actionable & pragmatic intelligence.

 

Not really related:

 

Genius way Iran won the war

Genius way Iran won the war. David Harsanyi:

Other than losing their entire navy, air force, a few strata of political leadership, top military minds, over 1,000 senior IRGC and Basij commanders, air defense and radar sites, numerous scientists, ballistic missile stockpiles and most launchers, drone and missile factories, proxies, etc.. Iran has the upper hand.

Forgot to mention: Iran’s proxy army, Hamas, decimated and without missiles. Iranian ally in Syria, Assad, gone. Hezbollah taking it on the chin. Iran went from a regional power to a brittle regime that will still have to deal with internal discontent, not to mention pressure from the Gulf states and Israel.

Newman Costanza:

The lesson for other countries is clear….. That’s right.. self assassinate, destroy your military and factories, kill your own scientists and you too can have the upper hand. Why not pay the US for a good old fashioned bombing, you’ll win more quickly that way. Genius.

British leftist named “solar enthusiast 🇬🇧 “:

Trump capitulated as he had to, this was a disaster.

There’s some awesome pain out there from lefties. But really, now completely wrong can you be? Like the Black Knight in Monty Python.

The West’s parasite politics

The West’s parasite politics. By Jack Atkinson in The Spectator.

The West today:

America is the wealthy, capable, relentlessly active grandfather who still pays the bills, still fixes the roof, still shows up when danger turns financial or physical, and still serves as the family’s emergency backstop.

Europe, Britain and Australia are the adult children who mismanaged their own households, neglected their own responsibilities, and now spend their time lecturing the one relative still keeping the lights on. …

The deeper story is that too many ‘allied’ governments have become structurally dependent, strategically incapable, and morally evasive. …

It is a family of overgrown children still running tabs through grandad’s account while pretending they are financially independent. …

Iran:

It should not be remotely controversial to state the obvious: Iran has long been a grave and growing threat. The fact that this basic context all but disappeared from so much mainstream commentary over the last month tells you everything about the moral vanity and intellectual dishonesty of the modern media class. …

Even cautious reporting now accepts the core point: Iran’s nuclear infrastructure has been degraded, but not all of its leverage has disappeared. That is precisely why sustained pressure matters. A regime with less money, less reach, fewer proxies, and less nuclear ambiguity is plainly a lesser threat than the same regime flush with cash, reach and impunity. Only in the decadent political culture of the modern West does this have to be argued as though it were somehow novel.

And then came Operation Midnight Hammer. The strategic lesson was unmistakable. …

It was another reminder that the competent relative in this family still knows how to pick up the tools and do the hard job (that many Presidents and powerful leaders have put off or failed to act whilst the threat only grew stronger) while the weak, ineffective allied leaders of nations who benefit, opt to grandstand, criticise and complain about lack of diplomacy (as if that was a viable option) or the nuances of how it was done, from the comfort of their armchair. …

Globalists gotta sneer:

Gratitude for the many wins is nowhere to be found. Instead, Trump is mocked for boasting, sneered at for his style, and dismissed as though the only thing that matters in foreign policy is whether the commentariat finds a leader aesthetically pleasing. This is the great fraud of the contemporary West: results are minimised, risks are memory-holed, and the one leader willing to impose costs on enemies is treated as the real embarrassment.

  • The Abraham Accords were real.
  • Gulf alignment against Iran is real.
  • Nato burden-sharing has risen under pressure. Iran’s nuclear program has come under more direct strain than at any point in recent memory.
  • Many global conflicts have been resolved by Trump.
  • Aggression by adversaries has been minimal whilst he’s been in touch – again, not a coincidence.

By contrast, the frailty and weakness of the US and its allies under Biden coincided with catastrophe after catastrophe: the Afghanistan withdrawal, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and October 7 and the Middle East disaster that followed. Adversaries notice weakness. They exploit hesitation. They respect force. That is not ideology. It is the oldest rule in international politics.

The inconvenient truth for detractors is that peace through strength has worked and will be a defining legacy of the Trumpian era.

Britain:

Britain, for its part, has become a masterclass in second-rate moralising. Keir Starmer now speaks of a ‘new and dangerous world’ while nudging Britain closer to Europe and biting the American hand that feeds. …

It is risk aversion disguised as principle. And it fits Starmer perfectly: a weak leader’s favourite habits are moralising, finger-pointing and hoping nobody notices that he is doing neither the leading nor the lifting. Fortunately, Britain has seen past the facade as Starmer’s record low approval ratings since polling began …

Australia:

Australia looks no better. Anthony Albanese has delivered the kind of managerial, anaemic rhetoric that passes for leadership in a complacent political culture: stay calm, conserve fuel, brace for disruption, use public transport, do not panic-buy. That is not statecraft. That is late-stage crisis management in an energy-rich country that somehow still imports almost all of its fuel and remains vulnerable to precisely the sort of geopolitical shock any serious government should have spent years preparing for. …

The family equivalent is the unemployed middle-aged son living in the parents’ basement demanding another handout. …

Nato:

The problem is that too many of them have turned dependency into a governing philosophy: rely on American deterrence, American naval power, American intelligence, American markets and American risk tolerance, then sneer at the Americans for being insufficiently delicate while performing the burdens everyone else quietly outsourced.

It is the brat’s posture in its purest form: entitlement without gratitude, dependence without humility, and endless criticism of the one adult doing the heavy lifting.

Realist Trump:

The sharpest argument for Trump on foreign policy is not that he is saintly or subtle. It is that he understands a civilisational truth much of the modern West is too vain, too soft or too dishonest to admit: order survives when somebody is willing to enforce it. If Iran’s power is broken down, its proxies weakened, its nuclear ambiguity narrowed and its ability to blackmail the world through terror and chokepoints reduced, that will not be a tragedy. It will be a major gain. And the allied governments that stand to benefit most from that gain should stop behaving like spoiled children rolling their eyes at the grandfather while waiting for him to pay the next bill.

You’ll never see that point of view in the legacy globalist media. It would interrupt the posturing and Trump derangement.

Europeans find Trump erratic, and the US no longer as benevolent

Europeans find Trump erratic, and the US no longer as benevolent. By Yaroslav Trofimov in The WSJ.

Crowning a year of disputes with the Trump administration over trade tariffs, support for Ukraine and the future of Greenland, the Iran war has placed America’s friends in Europe, Asia and the Middle East in front of an uneasy dilemma.

Their most important ally is acting in ways that they see as erratic and that have already caused hardship and uncertainty. The war has sapped their economies and even bigger shocks loom if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, deepening the worldwide energy crisis.

Many — on both sides of the Atlantic — wonder if they are even allies anymore. Angered by the refusal of European nations to join the war alongside the U.S. and Israel, President Trump has called European countries cowards, and threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization altogether.

“The United States is unpredictable,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker from Germany’s ruling party, echoing a widespread sentiment in Europe. “It’s not a reliable partner anymore for the Western world.”

But they have no alternative to the US, because they can no longer do it for themselves:

Their quandary is that nobody else can substitute for America’s military and economic might in the foreseeable future. China and Russia also carry out predatory policies. It will take time for middle-sized democracies in Europe and Asia to wean themselves from dependencies on America and to intensify cooperation among themselves.

Ever since World War II, the U.S. was mostly a benevolent power for its fellow democracies and achieved its hegemony by consent, said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. That’s not how Trump’s America is viewed today.

“If you insult your allies and push them to the brink in every negotiation, if you present your ugliest face to the world, then this consent will evaporate,” Fullilove said. “But what is the alternative to the U.S.-led alliance system? The U.S. is the only country that can project power anywhere on Earth. Who else will lead the West, if not Washington?” …

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that European and Asian allies, unlike the U.S., depend on energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz and should be the ones to step up and deal with the problem. He added that the U.S. will examine after the Iran war whether the NATO alliance has become “a one-way street” where America defends Europe, but is denied the use of its bases and overflight rights by some European states.

At Monday’s news conference, Trump touted his good relationship with North Korea’s leader as he complained about South Korea’s refusal to join the war on Iran, and said that he still wants Greenland. …

Greenland was too much for the Europeans. But what if the US wants it as a price for keeping them safe, Iran non-nuclear, and the Straits of Hormuz open?

The January crisis over Trump’s attempt to seize the Danish possession of Greenland, when it seemed for a few days that the U.S. might launch a military operation against its European allies, became a key turning point for European leaders.

“This will never be forgotten,” said retired French Lt. Gen. Michel Yakovleff. “Psychologically, Trump talking about taking Greenland was the equivalent of a father talking, jokingly, of raping one of his daughters. Obviously, it’s a new world in the family after that.”

Outrage at Trump’s America is evident from opinion polling. Some 34% in Europe’s biggest nations view the U.S. as a threat, a figure comparable or even higher than the perceived threat from China, North Korea or Iran, according to a YouGov poll released in February, before the war began. Only Russia is considered a bigger danger. Such attitudes explain why no traditional ally in Europe or Asia yielded to Trump’s demands to join the military campaign, and to deploy forces to reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz to free navigation.

In fact, the current war is the first major conflict in a century that the U.S. is waging without any of its traditional allies. Almost every NATO member showed up in Afghanistan. Countries like the United Kingdom and Spain joined the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Dozens of nations participated in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Even in Vietnam, American troops were helped by Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand.

Globalists all line up on one side, patriots and realists on the other.

Hello, Europeans. We are increasingly fed up with your shit.

Hello, Europeans. We are increasingly fed up with your shit. By Eric S. Raymond.

Hello, Europeans. The first thing you need to understand about the rant I’m about to utter is that I’m not MAGA, not a Trumpite, but a libertarian who has in the past nevertheless been strongly supportive of US military presence overseas. …

Also relevant: I have a history of having lived in Europe and traveled there extensively. I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish, and have been passably fluent in Italian and French as well. I could probably still find my way around London and Rome and central Paris reasonably well. So if you’re tempted to tell yourselves that I’m some kind of parochial American hick, abandon that hope.

All that was set-up. So that, when I tell you that almost the entirety of the US electorate, not just Trump supporters, is increasingly fed up with your shit, take me seriously.

We’ve been cleaning up your messes and keeping the sea lanes open since 1917. And that was for you, not us — we, being very close to resource self-sufficient, don’t need that investment so much. We’ve spent enormous amounts of blood and treasure on keeping you safe. We risked nuclear hellfire on our own cities for nearly 50 years to keep Soviet tanks from rolling through the Fulda Gap.

Even since the Cold War ended, we’ve subsidized your socialist-playpen welfare states and disastrous immigration policies by taking the need to maintain militaries more effective than a sack of wet farts off the table.

Now we’ve come looking for help keeping a bunch of rabid Islamic fanatics from getting nuclear weapons that are a clear and present danger to all of you even more than they are to us, and what do we hear?

“Waah! It’s another Republican president we don’t like, just like the last half dozen of them! So we’re going to sulk in a corner, except when we’re biting at your ankles with crap like airspace restrictions.”

No. No, we’re not going to take this anymore. It’s not just conservatives who have had enough, it’s moderates and people who used to be strong supporters of liberal internationalism.

Our citizen’s willingness to pay higher taxes to protect you was upward-bounded by your gratitude. Now that we know your gratitude has effectively gone to zero, so does our willingness.

Don’t expect this to change if the Democrats take power here. They are much less liberal-internationalist than Republicans now. While they might make mouth noises that soothe you, their overriding concern is the gaping, insatiable maw of their income transfer programs. They’ll sacrifice subsidizing Europe’s playpen socialism to feed their domestic version in a heartbeat. And there is no longer any significant Democratic constituency to argue against that.

In truth, three decades after the Cold War ended there is no American constituency at all for the massive subsidies you get. It frankly surprises me they lasted this long, that we were this patient with your cowardice and your bitchy whining.

This moment has been a long time coming. It’s not Donald Trump sinking the transatlantic alliance, it is absolutely you. …

To keep the alliance alive, you had to not behave so repulsively that you would alienate the median American voter. At this you are comprehensively failing.

Times are changing.

Communism and feminism are not sustainable

Communism and feminism are not sustainable. By Stefan Molyneux.

Like it or not. It is a simple, brutal fact:

Cultures that listen to their women are being displaced by cultures that ignore their women.

Commenters:

The West would rather see itself destroyed than have to have this conversation. …

And it’s the white liberal women that are the foot soldiers of Islamification …

This woman could be the possible cause of the fall of Western Civilization.

HotSotin:

Crazy idea: Let’s split a country in socialist and capitalist halves and check in on them in 75 years.

 

 

Josh Patt:

What happens when one country moves from communism to capitalism and the other one moves in the other direction?

 

 

China is still run by a “communist” party, but China only moved from being a low income country to the middle income country it is today when, after Mao died, it abandoned communist economics and adopted capitalist economics.

Feminist and communist societies always get out-competed, apparently.

Covid, Some Female Cancers and Childhood Asthma

Covid, Some Female Cancers and Childhood Asthma. By David Archibald.

With two major wars going on now, major economic disruption due to fuel outages, and famine pending due to lack of nitrogenous fertiliser, it is easy to forget covid with its initial inflammatory insult and ongoing assault on the immune system. Graphs like this suggest that something is going very wrong, which will collapse our health systems at some point:

 

 

The infection rate was quite stable prior to covid. It is now up 150%.

 

 

Respiratory deaths as a percentage of all deaths are up 200% on their pre-covid numbers.

It would be good to see corroboration from other data sets. To that end, a trio of Chinese researchers have put together a compilation of data sets. They have started producing papers on the results of their sifting through that data. Their first paper is on the increase in some cancer rates in a cohort of 4.9 million females … This table shows the increase in cancer rates due to covid infection:

 

 

… The research trio followed up with another paper on covid’s effect on the incidence of childhood asthma: …

 

 

 

The solution to covid remains the same as the solution to HIV, which inspired it. The solution is a daily dose of a combination antiretroviral therapy, with the addition of mitigation measures against airborne transmission.

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

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

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

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

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

Slain Iranian mastermind  Gen. Qasem Soleimani

His niece in LA

His grandniece in LA

Shane Galvin at The NY Post:

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

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

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

Fugitive Caesar:

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

Skely:

Modern warfare is wild.

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

Wi-Fi and leaky brains

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His recommendations:

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

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

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

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

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

 


More:

A Tesla Model S Plaid has 46 antennas.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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