Merry Old England has a new Mayor

Merry Old England has a new Mayor.

Ealing is a district and major metropolitan center located in West London, approximately 7.5 miles (12.1 km) west of Charing Cross. In the western part of Greater London:

 

What a difference government policy can make:

hat-tip David Archibald

Software technoapocalypse: AI can now convert executables to source code, so secrecy is gone

Software technoapocalypse: AI can now convert executables to source code, so secrecy is gone. By Eric S. Raymond.

The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.

In this example, Eric recovered the source code (what humans write, with language words and comments) from the binary (the program file your computer runs, just 0’s and 1’s for your processor). This was impossible until very recently.

I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal [a computer language popular in the 1990s] from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust [the emerging systems programming language, the successor to the C language] and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.

The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn’t have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.

A revolution in the economics and use of software is arriving:

This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.

I say “almost” because there is going to be one way to maintain secrecy. Software as a service with the executable hiding behind a network connection to the cloud. But as of now, we must assume that anything shipped as an executable, or even a firmware image, is as transparent as glass. It won’t keep its secrets for any longer than it takes for somebody to be motivated to throw an LLM at it.

I did not see this coming. When I wrote down the theory of open source, 30 years ago now, I thought closed source would be gradually driven towards extinction by cost gradients, but survive indefinitely in certain niches. I did not foresee it being wiped out in a technoapocalypse. …

Legal impediments? Not really:

There are still some obstacles. In US law, decompilation of a binary is a derivative work of the binary that falls under whatever copyright it had. However, it is also settled law that if you decompile binary code to a precise specification of what it does, then generate fresh code from that without looking at the decompiled stuff, you’re in the clear. This was the case law that allowed PC clones to exist, after Phoenix Technologies reverse engineered the original IBM PC BIOS.

The two-step process — binary to specification to unencumbered code — will no longer takes a large number of programmers and years of development time. With an LLM, it’s now a thing you can do in a day. Ubiquity will make it impractical to prosecute all the people who might skip the specification step.

Wiggling already:

Forced migration from shipped binaries to tied cloud services [where the actual computation is run on the software company’s servers, not on your computer] will be tried — Adobe pioneered this, and Microsoft is pushing it as hard as they can given that their OS is a binary that has to run locally. Both companies are seeing massive user revolts over this. There is good reason to doubt that it’s a strategy that can hold customers in the long term.

Also, a lot of things can’t safely be tied to the cloud at all, because they can’t tolerate a random network outage. Machine tools, medical devices…

Technoapocalypse:

A whole lot of proprietary software business models are going to collapse. Hard. One that I think might survive is tax software; being able to decompile it doesn’t necessarily do you a lot of good because its actual value is tracking a ruleset that changes over time and has to be maintained by vendor specialists. But cases like this are unusual. …

We’re entering a new world, with a lot of ancient comfortable assumptions being blown up. It’s going to be fun to watch.

Microsoft Office has just been decoded. By Jhet Borja, at Tom’s Hardware.

Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude.

Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.

Eric S. Raymond:

Brandon Thomas isn’t just trying to provide compatible replacements for these tools. He’s attempting to break the entire enshittified business model that produced them.

Power transferring from nation states to big tech companies

Power transferring from nation states to big tech companies. By Joel Kotkin at spiked.

These elite tech companies are far more powerful than Trump or any state apart from China. Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are individually all worth more than Italy, Canada, Brazil, Russia or Mexico. More importantly, these companies increasingly dominate information flows, much of Hollywood and, most disturbingly, have gained an unprecedented hold on society, particularly among younger generations.

Our era is marked by a shift in geopolitical influence from governments towards a handful of elite tech firms which, as National Affairs notes, constitute ‘new superpowers’ on the global stage. …

The relationship between the oligarchs and the political elite more closely resembles that between the barons and King John at Runnymede — although there’s no contemporary Magna Carta in the offing. A clearly cowed Trump [King John] has called for light-touch supervision of AI, which no doubt pleases most of the oligarchs [barons]….

The left might do a deal allowing big tech to rule in partnership with a lefty bureaucratic state:

In all probability, the Democrats will offer something that empowers the current tech oligarchy through a lethal combination of corporate and state power. This was the model favoured by the Biden administration.

Free-market competition, generally the best means of preventing an excessive concentration of power, will give way to AI-empowered oligopolies capable of eliminating competition with what have been described as ‘algorithmic firing squads’. …

Firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic have maintained close links with the Democrats, even as some of their representatives savage them in the press. Sam Altman recently praised governor Gavin Newsom as ‘thoughtful’ on AI.

The right wing techs (at least at the leadership level) include SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril. Most tech employees in California are still solidly pro-Democrat.

Western social media affected by Ukrainian strikes on Russian AI centers

Western social media affected by Ukrainian strikes on Russian AI centers. By Brave AI.

Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers in late October 2026 have significantly disrupted Russian bot networks, causing a drastic drop in automated social media activity. (Yandex is Russia’s equivalent to Google.)

By targeting the infrastructure hosting 70% of Russian searches and training AI models, the strikes crippled the backend systems many propaganda bots relied on for coordination and deployment.

 


The outages affected the servers supporting bot farms responsible for spreading misinformation, manipulating public opinion, and amplifying divisive content across platforms like X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Researchers and users noted a dramatic decline in suspicious engagement, fake accounts, and coordinated posting campaigns, effectively silencing millions of suspected Russian bot accounts.

The Sasovo data center previously hosted two of the three Yandex supercomputers, which were used to train its YandexGPT large language model.

Jarosław Wolski (a lefty):

De-Russified internet (due to Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers) suddenly reveals wonders in the socials:

  • support for AfD in social media has dropped by 56%.
  • fewer “Polish” accounts inciting against Ukrainians
  • fewer “Ukrainian” ones inciting against Poles
  • support for MAGA online has sharply fallen.

Waiting for further measurable results of the sudden drops in support for Gaśniczakokacapów, AfD, Trump, etc.

 

 

How much of the Western — particularly US — politics is driven by Russian and Chinese bots and Pakistani influencers masquerading as Western citizens?

For instance, on Joanne’s blog (which allows comments) there are always a couple of what are almost certainly Chinese trolls — commenters who flare up at the appearance of anything that lowers the status of the CCP.

If any accounts you follow went off line for the last few days, they are probably Russian bots.

hat-tip David Archibald

Melbourne Islamic centre linked to UAE flight terror

Melbourne Islamic centre linked to UAE flight terror. By Oscar Godsell at News24.

Mr al-Hammami has been accused of attempting to hijack a passenger jet and crash the aircraft into an Israeli airport. …

UAE Attorney-General Hamad Saif al-Shamsi said the man had provided a detailed confession following his arrest over the alleged September 30, 2026, mid-air attack.

The UAE authorities allege the pilot’s radicalisation began while he was studying in Melbourne in 2017, when he was exposed to extremist literature and propaganda. …

“He was influenced by Takfiri ideology through reading extremist literature and following online content glorifying terrorist organisations and suicide attacks.” …

“The suspect admitted that, while studying in Melbourne, Australia, he regularly attended a mosque affiliated with (RMIT),” Emirates News Agency reported. …

Years of preparation:

Authorities said he had allegedly chosen a career in aviation specifically to carry out a mass-casualty attack inspired by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.

Are their votes worth it?

The Albanese government gave more than $68,000 in taxpayer funding to a Melbourne Islamic centre linked to the accused Israel-bound flight attacker. …

The program, administered by the federal Department of Home Affairs, was intended to help young people learn or maintain languages other than English.

Thesis: Women are not fit for leadership

Thesis: Women are not fit for leadership. By The Doge Patriarch.

The usual warning about generalizations, statistics, and exceptions apply throughout what follows.

We are still cavemen. Genetics change very slowly. Our brains and bodies have only just begun to process the change of the agricultural revolution, not to mention the internet and iPhones, which two generations ago were science fiction. …

 

We are different from them only in circumstance.

 

For women, 100% of their female ancestors were mothers. To suggest that the female brain is not optimized for motherhood is biological denialism. … Generation after generation molded women’s brains for this purpose and this purpose above all else. The greatest female warriors, leaders, explorers, etc. would have all been out-competed by the woman who simply had children and ensured their survival above all else. …

Unlike men who abandon their offspring, women who abandon their offspring disappear from the genetic record because a baby that’s never breastfed is a dead baby. …

We are not more than our biology. We are products of our biology. To ignore how evolution has shaped our brains is a societal attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. …

The thesis:

With all of these selection pressures molding women’s brains, there are places where this is advantageous and where it is not. By arguing that women are not fit for leadership, I am also arguing that men are not fit for daycare. …

Teamwork:

Large groups of men generally cooperate better than women. Because men underwent more selection pressure for cooperation.

On a mammoth hunt, if you disregard your place in the hierarchy, you can die. The military is essentially the modern version of the mammoth hunt. A man knows his rank in the hierarchy, and will charge at the enemy when told. When victory is won, it shall be his too.

Women on the other hand did not experience this pressure as severely. A woman who completely disregards her position in the hierarchy does not get the whole tribe killed. That is why mixed-sex armies and units consistently perform worse than all-male units. …

The power games women play are usually bloodless. Thus, women will fight constant skirmishes with each other.

All-male companies work. We know this. Why don’t all-female companies operate efficiently?

Male politics — play the ball, not the man:

Male leaders and male-dominated political philosophies generally criticize ideas in detail, not individuals.

Karl Marx was an unemployed bum who crashed on his successful friend’s couch for long periods of his life, and was estranged from his family because he constantly asked them for money.

However, you probably didn’t know that. Because when men debate Marxism, it’s about the bad ideas, not the man himself.

In male politics there is an underlying assumption that we should “separate art from the artist”. Because great ideas can sometimes come from really strange people.

Female politics — so woke:

This is dramatically contrasted by female dominated politics, where the speaker is far more important than the idea. When women attack each other, they attempt to undermine the speaker’s credibility rather than the ideas the speaker is espousing.

You see this in comments sections all over the internet. Many times this boils down to name-calling. “Virgin” “Nazi” “Whore” “Incel”, etc. …

The important distinction is they are not criticizing what was said, instead they criticize who said it. Feminized men do this too.

As another example, just look at how Bluesky talks about Trump. It’s never about policies that have logical holes like Swiss cheese, It’s always about how orange he is. Or the size of his hands.

Women will also bully a consensus out of each other rather than refine ideas through debate. When a consensus is reached though bullying tactics, it is defended rigorously regardless if the consensus is correct or has outlived its usefulness. …

Even worse, it shifts from “You can’t say that!” to “You must say this!” quite easily. This phenomenon is seen on the political left almost exclusively. … The singer Ed Sheeran got in hot water with the ‘free Palestine’ people for firing a supporting musical act for shouting “free Palestine”. Note, he did not say anything against the artist, he simply said he didn’t want his tour to be political. … And interestingly enough,… Ed Sheeran caved to the mob. Not all men are fit for leadership after all.

The reason for this behavior is evolutionary psychology. Social isolation is dangerous, especially for women. Being a single mother with no support structure was a death sentence for 99.99% of human history. If a woman held an unpopular opinion and was ejected from the tribe for it, it’s very unlikely she would survive. And if she did survive, she would be picked up by another tribe and then placed at the bottom of that tribe’s hierarchy.

Women will say a slogan they don’t agree with so they don’t become socially isolated. It’s survival.

Standing up against a mob telling you: “Say FUCK ICE!” Is scary, and lots of men cave to the pressure too. How many people caved to the pressure during 2020 and said: “Black lives matter”?  …

Fortunately, there are many exceptions

A leader is someone who won’t cave. Have you ever met someone who can stand in the face of a mob and tell them that they’re all wrong? If so, they were probably a man. …

A leader must be disagreeable. A leader must be the kind of person who will stand their ground and refuse to be pushed around. …

Agreeableness under pressure:

Women have always been physically weaker than men, this shouldn’t be controversial. But what effect did this have on the female brain? Surely the women who went around picking fights with men either learned their lesson very quickly, or died.

Over many generations, this results in women who are keen at detecting threats to their personal safety and favor a non-violent conflict resolution. …

If two young women are kidnapped by another tribe, one fights back as hard as she can, while the other gives in, which one passes her genes on?

Evolution does not care about consent. The women that submitted in the face of danger survived, while the ones that fought back did not. This resulted in a female brain that will seek safety even if it is unjust. …

Stockholm syndrome, where the kidnapping victim falls in love with the kidnapper, is another application of this safety instinct. For 99.99% of human history, if a woman was kidnapped, nobody was coming for her because the tribe had been wiped out. The safest option for her was to fall in love with your kidnapper and have his babies. We’re all decedent from the men and women who did this. The human prehistoric past was unfettered barbarism. …

Lefty lies about matriarchy:

There is a claim in progressive archeology circles: that human beings were matriarchal before recorded history.

In my opinion, it’s quite easy to debunk. What would a woman leader of a tribe do if a man didn’t want to obey her? Exactly.

They make this claim because it is before recorded history so they can bury the lie in our general ignorance of the time. And then, once agriculture started and history started to be recorded, everywhere is suddenly patriarchal!

I don’t think they fully understand that they are implying that once societies tried patriarchy, they became more successful. Because it’s impossible to not come to that conclusion if all of prehistory was matriarchal. Once we stopped being matriarchal, we started building cities!

Of course this is not true. Female leadership has never existed on any large scale throughout human history. Wherever it was tried, it failed. …

From China to Rome, Persia to Ethiopia. Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Roman pagans. They all came to the same conclusion despite having no contact with each other, and this conclusion stuck for thousands of years. …

The EU? Collapsing economy and an uncontrolled third world invasion.

Raising children, social connections, homemaking. These are all women’s domains. And throughout history men have respected women’s authority WITHIN these domains.

Raising armies, managing empires, responding to threats. These are all men’s domains. And throughout history women have respected men’s authority WITHIN these domains.

There was a viral trend about a year ago of women asking men how often they think of the Roman empire. The women were always floored by how often, because they never think about the Roman empire at all! Yes, that’s because we are different. Babies, gossip, and relationships. Those are what you’re designed for. While empire building, conquest, and war is what I am built for. …

Male exceptionalism:

There is a concept in evolutionary biology called male exceptionalism. To put it simply, evolution uses men as experiments. While for women, it plays safe.

IQ intelligence male female

The distribution of g (raw intelligence) in male and female populations. The scale of the horizontal axis is in units of the male standard deviation. Only 37% of humans with IQs over 120 (the bottom of managerial level) are female. As the threshold IQ moves up, the male-female gap only grows larger. Blame God.

 

The reasons for this are simple. Men are a gamble. We can father 1000 children, or 0. If nature plays it safe with a man, there’s not much to gain. While if your genes hit the jackpot and create a gigachad genius that fathers the whole next generation, massive success! [Genghis Khan, Elon Musk]

Women obviously cannot father the next generation. They can only have a limited number of children in their lives. Evolutionary speaking, there’s no reason to gamble with women’s brains.

This doesn’t mean that men are simply better, it means that men are over represented at both ends of the great/terrible spectrum. …

Political leadership today:

Pushing your nation or political party to be artificially selecting women as leaders will lead to ruinous results.

 

Naturally, the political right should respond to the popularity of female leadership on the left by doing the opposite. Male leadership. Debates, ideas, hierarchy and cooperation.

However, I sincerely doubt the modern controlled opposition Republican party will manage to not fumble this. And instead they will attempt to out-feminism the other side and we’ll end up with president Tulsi Gabbard.

Throughout the West for the last few decades, women have been systematically promoted to higher positions at the expense of males, because they were women. We now have many women in leadership positions, in politics, bureaucracy, academia, and the corporate world.

Has the quality of leadership, the quality of public debate, and the effectiveness of our ruling class gone up, stayed about the same, or gone down in the last few decades?

Pauline Hanson at CPAC

Pauline Hanson at CPAC. By Cloe Maher in The West Australian.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane on Saturday, she called Opposition leader Angus Taylor a “smarmy management consultant,” then went after net-zero:

“The uni-party has taken their turns running this country into the ground,” Hanson told the conference, according to The Australian.

“Both must take accountability.”

She also unveiled plans for a royal commission into net zero emissions targets if One Nation formed government, promising to expose what she described as corruption “swindle” at the heart of the nation’s climate policies.

Pointing to the Liberal’s Paris Agreement and emissions reduction targets, Senator Hanson argued the party could not be trusted to reverse net-zero policies. …

“The Liberals signed us up to the Paris Agreement and net zero…and they have opted the targets into law and made them even worse. So why would we trust them to get us out of it?”  …

Putting aside past grievances to defeat Labor:

“I know what it means to put personal history aside and turn the other cheek. The Liberal Party threw me out and then threw me in jail,” she said.

“I do have reasons to hold a grudge but I also have children and grandchildren. Their future matters more. If I can put personal grievances aside others can do the same. …

“Some of you are thinking about closing the business, some thinking about taking the skills overseas, and some are giving up on this country. Please don’t.”

 

From serving fish and chips in her shop, in 1987

Islamic group dobs in John Cleese as a “terrorist”

Islamic group dobs in John Cleese as a “terrorist”. By Andrew Doyle.

John Cleese has been reported to Prevent, the UK government programme designed to stop people from becoming terrorists …

The complaint against Cleese was made by a member of the public, and the details passed to 5Pillars, an Islamist media outlet based in London. … 5Pillars has ‘expressed support for an Islamic caliphate, Sharia (Islamic principles and law) penal codes and physical jihad’ and ‘repeatedly abused and intimidated Muslim liberals, counter-extremists, and human rights activists’. ….

In its report, 5Pillars repeated the complainant’s claim that Cleese’s jokes and comments ‘go beyond legitimate criticism of Islam and instead portray Muslims collectively as violent, criminal and morally depraved’. …

 

Five pillars promoting the new film, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, starring two-time Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali. The future?

 

The complainant to Prevent specifically cited one post that read: ‘I personally prefer a culture that does not approve of FGM, child marriage and killing infidels’. Is that really all that controversial? …

Cleese rightly rejects the nonsense term ‘Islamophobic’ and instead calls himself ‘Islamosceptic’. How could he be otherwise? This is a man who has brilliantly skewered closed systems of thought for many decades. Most of us will remember the Pythons’ televised debate with Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop Mervyn Stockwood following the release of Life of Brian in 1979. Just imagine the conniptions if the offended party were a representative from 5Pillars. The priggish outrage of Muggeridge and Stockwood would pale by comparison. …

Cleese has responded in the best possible way: by mocking it. He has said of the report to Prevent: ‘One of the proudest moments of my life. I would like to thank everyone concerned’. In another post he wrote: ‘I look forward to being arrested’. The tyrannical mindset — always humourless — cannot bear to be ridiculed. Few will be surprised that there are those who wish to see Cleese silenced, and that they will try to weaponise the law to that end. …

Guess who’s side the UK Government is on?

The government has, of course, fallen in line with the woke orthodoxy. An official UK counter-terrorism website lists ‘cultural nationalism’ as one of the ideological strands associated with ‘extreme right-wing terrorism’. … This is the gloss it provides to the phrase ‘cultural nationalism’:

“A belief that “Western Culture” is under threat from mass migration into Europe and from a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups. The ideology tends to focus on the rejection of cultural practices such as the wearing of the burqa, or the perceived rise of the use of sharia law. In the UK this has been closely associated with anti-Islam groups.”

Imagine a future with woke governments and an ever increasing Islamic population in the UK. You’d have to ask an Imam before speaking. Or joking. No more like this:

The past?

The UK has to choose: Cleese or 5Pillars. They are clearly not compatible.

 

Number of teens who identify as gay or bisexual is in ‘free fall’

Number of teens who identify as gay or bisexual is in ‘free fall’. By Casey Parks at The Washington Post.

In 2021, 30 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as lesbian or bisexual. Last year, 17 percent did. …

A few years ago, after the pandemic shutdowns, the CDC data showed big upticks in the percentage of high school girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual. …

The rate of boys who identify as gay or bisexual has remained roughly the same over the past decade.

The fad is over. Bisexuality and lesbianism was just a fad among young girls at school, egged on by political indoctrination/wokeness. Girls are more prone to trends, and their sexuality is more fluid, and they fell for it hard. Boys were less affected. Trans, too, is dying down.

The most fundamental divide in politics

The most fundamental divide in politics. By Richard Miniter.

Well, I’m going to sound a little bit like a Marxist here because only Marxists talk about class theory in an intelligent way. But the devil can sometimes tell the truth, right?

There are two classes that are dividing our society. … One is the unaccountable class. And these are people whose pay is not tied to results. It doesn’t affect them if the economy grows at 1% or 3%. No change in the real world affects them in a professional way.

Then there’s the accountable class, and these are people who live on results. If you fail to save too many patients as an emergency room surgeon, you’re shown the door. If you are a shoe salesman and you don’t sell any shoes, there’s the door, right? If you don’t turn up for work, uh, laying bricks, there’s the door. …

At every strata of our society, at every income level, at every education level, there are accountable and unaccountable people. But that’s the real divide, right? Jeff Bezos is a very wealthy man, but he’s highly accountable to shareholders. … It’s easier to show in a working class environment because it’s very clear if you don’t turn up for work, they just don’t pay you, right? People who will be punished by the market if they drift from the truth or drift from reality, and don’t provide value for other people. …

It affects everything about how you see the world:

Capitalism is essentially solving other people’s problems in exchange for money.. … If you’re out there curing the sick, or educating the young, or you’re winning a gold medal in the Olympics, or you’re writing software code, whatever you’re doing — if you’re paid by the performance of that, you’re on some deep level accountable.

And it changes who you are as a person and it changes what you do as a person. And from a political cultural sense, it changes how you think about the world. Your idea of justice, your idea of freedom, your idea of right and wrong.

The unaccountable class has conquered society since the 1930s, and it lives on the left:

But then there’s this large unaccountable class and these are people who live in a insulated, almost isolated world. These are people who might be in the bowels of bureaucracy of some big company. They might be trade union leaders who haven’t faced a competitive election in decades. And of course this is the tenured professors, the civil servants.

It doesn’t matter how quickly they move, whether they do anything at all. They get paid for showing up. …

During the run-up to the Iraq war, when I was talking to a lot to then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s staff, the generals were opposed to the Iraq war and I talked to them one-on-one. I asked why — I mean this must be your chance to show what you can really do. They … made a careerist argument. They said, listen Richard the problem with going to war as a general is that some people who have certain tactics, certain strategies, certain methods, are proven right and other people … are proven wrong. It’s bad for their careers, safer not to go to war at all, and then no one really knows who’s right and who’s wrong and we can just coast to retirement. …

Everything that you and the people who watch you don’t like about the world can be traced one way or another to the guiding hand of the unaccountable class. …

The fundamental political choice:

I wish it could say it’s, you know, individual versus the collective, or freedom versus slavery ,or one of those things you learn in philosophy class, but it’s not that. It’s fundamentally do you change yourself or do you change the world? Do you say I’m unhappy and therefore I need to change, I need to adapt to the reality beyond me. Or — I’m perfect, I need the world to change and accept me. …

The the body positivity is a classic case of this. The world needs to change what it finds attractive rather than you need to change.

So the political implications and the cultural implications for this are quite large because the people who think that they don’t need to change and they want the world to change to make them feel better about themselves. These people overwhelmingly gravitate toward the unaccountable class because they do not want to be shaped right by the outside world.

 

 

The French Intifada

The French Intifada. By the editorial team at The Australian.

[What began as student] protests, as British writer Brendan O’Neill reported in the New York Post on Wednesday, may be attracting hundreds of thousands on to the streets across France, but they are increasingly being “morphed into an orgy of Islamo-leftist violence”.

O’Neill says we are witnessing something extraordinary: an intifada in the heart of Europe.

“Surely no one can now deny the lethal error of throwing open a nation’s borders to the world, while sacrificing the ideals of integration at the altar of multiculturalism,” he said. …

Donald Trump was widely criticised on Tuesday when he warned that the French student riots were the inevitable result of “out of control mass migration … this isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great country”, he wrote on his Truth Social website.

Mr Trump has a point. There is far more to the student riots than the condition of French classrooms.

Brave AI on the meaning of Intifada:

Intifada is an Arabic term meaning “uprising” or “shaking off,” derived from a verb meaning to shake off dust or lethargy.

In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, it refers to popular uprisings by Palestinians against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

While the word can describe various uprisings globally (such as the 1916 Easter Rising or the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), in English it primarily denotes these Palestinian resistance movements.

It’s been going on for a while:

But it’s made a big step up in the last week.

The Downfall of Tucker Carlson

The Downfall of Tucker Carlson. By Stephen Green at PJ Media.

How many times does someone get to make excuses for Hitler before they get labeled “evil,” too?

Whatever that number is, I’m reasonably sure that Tucker Carlson just hit it.

Strike 3:

On a podcast late last week, Carlson interviewed former British Conservative Member of Parliament Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg to talk about the current sad state of Britain, and among other topics, how the British might be better off today if they’d just had the good sense to let the Nazis win World War II.

Strike 1:

This disturbing side of Carlson first came to my attention two years ago when he could be seen nodding along enthusiastically with the Palestinian Authority’s favorite Christian, Reverend Munther Isaac.

The Gaza War had been raging for just six months when Carlson chose to interview Isaac to find out how the Jewish State of Israel treats Christians. Isaac is a Palestinian Christian from Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem, where Christian ministers serve at the mercy of the Palestinian Authority. The PA has ethnically cleansed Bethlehem from 80% Christian 30 years ago to 80% Muslim today.

During his interview, Carlson failed to ask Isaac why he applauded the Oct. 7 atrocities — and that little omission was probably the best part of the podcast.

Strike 2:

Carlson’s new schtick came to my attention again later in 2024 when he happily hosted the musings of pseudo-historian Daryl “Oops!… He Holocausted Again” Cooper. According to Cooper, Nazi war atrocities and that little Holocaust business were just the Germans being merciful.

“We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people,” Cooper imagined the Germans thinking after fighting on the Eastern Front accidentally created more prisoners and refugees than Germany could cope with. “And one of them actually says, ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?’”

That’s an actual quote.

“Oopsies!” is not a valid excuse for the methodical execution (and sometimes torture) of six million Jews and another six million assorted “undesirables” like gays, Gypsies, cripples, and the mentally retarded. The Germans killed roughly 3.3 million Soviet POWs during the war, too, largely through forced labor and malign neglect — not by accident or out of mercy.

Yet Carlson endorsed him as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”

Carson was so good at analyzing US politics. But when he ventured to comment outside the US, his abysmal ignorance about the non-US world led to major faux pas and poor judgement — as above.