“Singapore cracks down on Chinese influence” | The Economist

I’ve served in the Australian embassy in Baijimg and our consulates in Shanghai and Hong Kong. One of the tasks we have, as diplomats, is to keep in touch with local Australians. We’d be part of the local business bodies, like the Australian-China Chamber of Commerce. We’d celebrate Australia Day and other Aussie holidays, inviting all the local Australians we knew of. Part of the job.

So, in one sense, what China does overseas is just doing that normal diplomatic work. 

The differences are what worries places like Singapore. One is that it’s the Communist Party of China. Not just the Chinese state. In the Australian embassy and consulates we were representing the state of Australia not a political party. Let alone a communist party, with their histories of overt and covert expansionism and influence peddling. 

Another difference is that Xi Jinping, calling for more such influence peddling, makes it on the basis of blood ties, not nationality. It’s as if our Australian embassies were calling on loyalty from Anglos around the world, not just Australian citizens.

That’s why Singapore, the “Lion City”, is wary of Chinese communist party interference. It’s why it recently invoked FICA, its Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act. 

From The Economist “Singapore cracks down on Chinese influence”, of 8 February 2024:

“F

estive fever” is how the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre describes the national mood in the run-up to Chinese New Year on February 10th. A different fever troubles the government of Singapore: how to deal with China’s allegedly extensive influence operations in the city-state. This month7a sweeping new law against foreign interference was invoked for the first time, against a Hong Kong-born Singaporean, Philip Chan.

Shadowy Chinese operations are not a new development. In 2018 Huang Jing, an academic at the Lee Kuan Yew school at the National University of Singapore, was expelled from the country for his ties to China’s security ministry. And misinformation and propaganda has long coursed through Singaporean social media. There are laws in place to regulate that. But the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act, passed in 2021 and known as fica, grants the home minister, K. Shanmugam, new powers to investigate individuals suspected of engaging in information campaigns by a hostile state. Mr Chan, the government declared, “has shown susceptibility to be influenced by foreign actors and willingness to advance their interests.”

I mention this because Alex Lo,  in his piece this morning says: [U.S. Senator] “Tom Cotton inexplicably claimed that the Lion City was infiltrated by the Chinese Communist party”. Nothing inexplicable about it.  Just that Senator Cotton is clearly more up to date with the news than Lo.

ADDED: The Economist article has a nice ending. Talking of Philip Chan, the Chinese businessman charged under the FICA act, The Economist wonders if it’s a case, as the Chinese say, of “killing the chicken to frighten the monkey”. That Chan is charged in order to scare more senior people. Final para: 

“Come to that, Singapore has not named China as the offending country in Mr Chan’s case. China has a way of making everyone chicken.”

Hah! 

Gaza was a beautiful Mediterranean resort: until Yasser Arafat

 

Click above for the video

The whole show above is worth it. Andrew Gold talks to Yasmine Mohammad.

Her comments about Gaza, before Yasser Arafat, and how lovely it was, are here (46:00). It was a mediterranean paradise until “old rubber lips” appeared on the scene in the late sixties. 

Gaza was destroyed by Arafat and his PLO, destroyed by the PA, then, most thoroughly, destroyed by Hamas — all the offshoots, the poisonous weeds of the Muslim Brotherhood. They could have made Gaza into Singapore; instead they turned it into Afghanistan. Choices they made. Because they hate Jews more than they love peace and prosperity. 

I bought Yasmine’s book “Unveiled” years ago. It’s a good read. She’s a brave woman. An apostate from Islam. Who was married to an al-Qaeda fighter, because her mother made her. The wonders of Islam. From an insider view. 

ADDED: 

• The Muslim Brotherhood grand plan for world domination, here. 
• Why isn’t the west talking about Islam?

More ADDED: 

According to polls since October 7th, on the West Bank support for Hamas is over 75%. The Palestinian Authority, with its monetary rewards paid for murdering Jews, is apparently not radical enough. They want a more murderous terrorist entity, a more genocidal outfit, a more kleptocratic gang, to take over. In Gaza, support for Hamas remains robustly over 70%.  With these we’re supposed to “make peace”?

Just how innocent are “innocent” Palestinians? 

Men in Black

Front page of South China Morning Post today.

Diversity Hong Kong style…. 

Our apparatchiks pay obeisance to Beijing point man on Hong Kong, Xia Baolong: "oBaoisance"?

I’m pro-Israel. Pro-Jew. Anti-Hamas. That seems to be rare in the west. Even progressive jews attack conservative jews.

 

Click above for the video

Caroline Glick rang a bell, I knew I’d written about her early on in this blog. 

And here it is. From June 2011. 

Above, she makes a lot of good points. On the Anti-Hamas, pro-Israel side of this issue. Which is where I stand. Not many (or not any) of my friends do. I’m a lone one, here in the west, in support of Israel. Even counting the Untied States. Where Biden’s support is weakening. And where the previous bilateral support of Israel has fractured. 

Towards the end, above, Glick talks of progressive Jews, who throw less progressive Jews under the bus, and are then upset that they’re hammered by the pro-Hamas side. Shame on them. 

Friends in Israel write to me that they’re in northern Israel near the Lebanon border. I ask about the rockets and the refugees. I’d read that there are huge numbers of Israelis evacuated from near the Lebanon border because Hezbollah was firing rockets into Israel. In breach of a UN Resolution, by the way. 

They write: 

The kibbutz we stayed last night full of evacuees from hard up to the border.. we talked to a few, who are making the best of the chaos.. 300,000 evacuees, schooling & lives on hold

I reply that this is not much covered in the western media. I’ve not seen much on BBC, ABC, CNN.

My post on Caroline Glick from 13 years ago, I’ve copied below. It’s kind of ironic. I wrote that post in the wake of a Tunisian lighting himself on fire. And today it’s someone lighting himself on fire because of Israel. Which Glick talks of. Plus ça change The post below (and here): 

Anti-Israel pro-Hamas pro-ceasefire cheerleaders support this barbarity

	Azzat Alsalem ⁦‪@AzzatAlsaalem‬⁩ A MusIim Girl was brutaIIy beaten in the streets of Raqqa/Syria by her family in an "honour killing" crime. Her family chased her in the streets and dragged her from hair. She was screaming and everyone kept watching. One of thousands of honour killing crimes Among MusIims. pic.twitter.com/HtvdogSNsA   27/2/2024, 4:07 am

Sent from my iPad

LA Lawyer

John (3rd from left) at the UCLA Barristers Ball, Skirball, LA

“Hong Kong in Trouble” | Stephen Roach, SCMP

Online here

To a large extent we brought this on ourselves.

First, early post-handover, 1997, our timid, our insecure, our pusillanimous bureaucrats called on Beijing's National People's Congress to "interpret" laws for us. When they should have done so themselves. 

Beijing clearly didn't want to do this. They wanted to show the world they were hands off. But our apparatchiks pressed and got what they wanted from Mummy China. Rulings — from Beijing — on things like whether babies born in Hong Kong to mainland mothers should be treated as locals. In short, we invited Beijing in. We let the nose of the camel into the tent. 

Then widespread demos in 2014. Moves proposed, by our local government and approved by Beijing — to move us towards universal suffrage — real, if limited, moves  — were rejected out of hand by our so-called "pan democrats", a loose coalition of pro-democracy activists from the plain-vanilla Left to the crazy Left. For them perfection was the enemy of action. They didn't get everything so they preferred nothing. 

We, many of us, thought it most unwise (stupid, in fact): to reject moves forward, even if they were only limited. We could gain a beachhead and move on. But no, the pan-dem loonies had to have their extreme ways and rejected it all, out of hand. 

Then, of course, the demos of 2019. These achieved their initial aims, the rejection of new extradition laws with China. Instead of resting on success, hotheads began demonstrating for independence for Hong Kong. Soon the demos became out-and-out riots, trashing our dear city. We saw all that with our own eyes. Burning subway stations, attacking mainland businesses, racist taunts at mainlanders. Horrid stuff. 

That brought on the Nation Security Law, which is the main cause of the problems identified by Stephen Roach above. 

On the plus side, Beijing's point man on Hong Kong, Xia Baolong has been in town and quoted as saying One Country Two Systems "will last forever". This is positive, given that it's otherwise due to expire in 2047. For day-to-day management by our own government and Common Law in our courts of law, 1C2S is key. To have a Senior Beijing official say so publicly is significant as he wouldn't say it without the most senior approvals in Beijing, including, I asssume, Xi Jinping.  /Snip:

The one country, two systems principle was one of 10 things that made Hong Kong different from mainland Chinese cities, Xia told the representatives, according to one attendee who asked not to be identified. Other distinguishing features were the city’s legal system, stock market, number of international banks and proficiency in English, the official was quoted as saying.

ADDED: The comments are mostly negative. 

Meantime, we hope that Roach's hope comes true: namely that he's wrong. 

Third World Politics Come to Britain

Click above for the video

Heydel-Mankoo: 

"It’s the greatest act of harm ever committed on the British people in 2,000 years. It’s far more consequential than Brexit and the EU, yet we were given a vote on that. The British people were never asked about any of this [mass immigration], and in fact just the opposite. They voted in every government to do just the opposite and had the vote betrayed. This is far more damaging to Britain than the cost of fighting the second world war. 

"People who have willingly allowed in a fifth column into this country who are actively undermining this nation, its institutions and seek to overthrow our established systems and structures, they absolutely should be tried for treason, or something along those lines. Because it is that significant. It that’s not treason -- the death of your own country -- I don’t know what is.”

How much has diversity enriched us? How much has mulitculturlism enriched us? 

This has been something on the agenda pretty much my whole life, in Australia in the sixties, when I first heard the world “multiculturalism”, to now. And for sure, I’d not want an Australia of the fifties, vs one of today. But there’s also the “too much” version. The UK has had mass immigration, far more that Australia and we have to ask if the net effect is good or bad. In my view, looking at what’s happening now in the UK, the net effect is bad. If so, why? The answer is Tony Blair, as PM, who said “we’re going to rub the Conservatives noses in diversity”. Well, they’ve done that, and it’s resulted in a country now bowling down to Islamism. 

“Good" "Believing" Muslims will never be loyal to Britain over the edicts of their own religion” | Momus Najmi

	Momus Najmi ⁦‪@theworldofmomus‬⁩ "Good" "Believing" Muslims will never be loyal to Britain over the edicts of their own religion. So, keep fooling yourself, because you have a moderate Muslim friend, who drinks alcohol with you and never prays and has never even read the Quran. Those are labelled as munafiq and…   25/2/2024, 6:31 pm

Sent from my iPad

“Nuclear Power? Yes, please”

Click above for the video

Sabine Hossenfelder says German politicians are stupid, for closing down perfectly operating nuclear stations. 

I agree. I'd add that Australian politicians are equally, maybe even more, stupid. Especially our Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, who has taken it in himself to twitter on about every nonsense objection. 

Britain: DON’T extradite Julian Assange!

 I’ve changed my mind on Julian Assange. 

Years ago, I bought the line that he was a traitor to America: by releasing details of American troops activities. So I was anti-Assange. 

I was wrong. 

Turns out that there were war crimes. That there was no endangerment of innocents. That what Assange did, in releasing documents to prove the misdeeds, was a service to fairness and decency in the world. 

Yet now the British government is being asked to send him to the United States, for “crimes” that are not even crimes in Britain. To face 175 years in prison. 

It’s wrong. Free Assange!

Gaza Amnesia

Remember October 7th? 

None of the luvvies on X who post their hate of Israel and love of Hamas -- the likes of Bernie Sanders, Rashidaa Tlaib, Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Jones -- remember it. 

There used to be the (obligatory) throat clearing: “of course what happened on October 7th is horrible. But...”. Now not even that. The luvvies are straight into the attack, on “child killers” from Israel. 

There used to be the (obligatory) throat clearing: “of course Israel has the right to exist. But...”. Now not even that. The luvvies quite openly call for the obliteration of Israel, a state established by the United Nations. 

Peter Schwartz covers this in a prescient piece ten years ago, "Altruism, the Gaza War and the Law of Causality” [Wayback]:

When someone is killed because, say, a hurricane made his roof cave in, journalists understand the need to explain that occurrence. They don’t simply report that Mr. Jones died when a heavy beam fell on his skull. Rather, they report that a hurricane blew in the roof, thereby making the beam fall. Perhaps they tell us about previous deaths, as well as expected future ones, resulting from the storm. That is, the news reports focus on the primary cause of Mr. Jones’ death.

In reporting on the current Gaza War, however, many journalists have abandoned this logical approach. Instead, they present effects without the real cause. They show the bombed houses and the wounded children, and attribute it all to the most proximate, perceptually observable “cause”: Israeli firepower. What is being ignored, of course, is the primary cause of the carnage: the aggression initiated by Hamas.

When police confront an armed robber and gunfire ensues, the cause is the robber. The existence of a police officer does not cause a need for the existence of criminals. The reverse, though, is true—the existence of criminals gives rise to the need for police. Aggression is the cause, self-defense is the resulting response. The Gaza story, if it were based on the principle of causality, would not be “Gazan Children Are Killed by Israeli Bombs,” but “Deaths of Gazan Children Are Byproducts of Hamas Attacks.”  Read on...

X platform “For You” setting: anti-Israel, pro-Hamas

Screenshot just now, from my X feed, showing the two settings:
“For You” and “Following”. 

The X platform (ex “Twitter”) has two settings you can choose to see stuff: One is “For You” and the other is “Following”. 

The “For You” one throws up posts to you, based on what you’ve shown an interest in. The “Following” setting is so all you see are the people you follow. 

I usually set my X to “For You”: I like to be surprised by what might turn up and what might be interesting. 

But lately this setting has become clogged by anti-Israel posts, often glorifying Hamas. It was balanced for a while after October 7th, then shifted, each day by an observable amount, till I noticed yesterday that it was pretty much all, at least 90%, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas. All of this is driven by an algorithm that knows I’m interested in the Middle East, and has been feeding me people’s posts on the issue. Which used to be balanced, but are no longer. Perhaps that’s due to the algorithm, perhaps due to simple more people posting anti-Israel pro-Hamas stuff. 

That’s fine and I learn what’s on their minds. But it’s also obvious that they follow a narrative. A narrative, moreover, which they repeat without understanding. Or, for which they willingly ignore the truth. Because the narrative is so often so wrong. 

I used to think that people were not as stupid as I now believe they are. So many of the people protesting in the centre of London, or in Sydney, against Israel, pro a ceasefire, don’t know the simplest things. Most don’t know what the “From the River to the Sea” chant calls for. How easy would it be to have found that out, before going on the streets to chant it yourself? But they haven’t bothered. 

If they don’t understand the simple chant of “from the River to the Sea”, it’s hardly surprising they don’t know the rather more complex history of Israel and Palestine. It’s not the least surprising that they don’t know the reality of history in the Levant, in this part of the Middle East. Mostly, they haven’t a clue. 

Here’s my summary of the narrative of the posters on “For  You”. Reductive, I know, but here it is, FWIW:

• European Jews (mostly white) invaded Palestine straight after the war. 
• These white supremacist Jews stole land from the peaceable locals, the Palestinians, the Muslim Arabs, who had been there for generations. They kicked the Palestinians off their own land, occupied it, oppressed the Palestinians and set up an apartheid state.
• They are now a colonialist, settler, white supremacist, apartheid state. 
• Palestinians, via the brave Hamas soldiers, took revenge on the horrid oppressors, on October 7th. In this they were fully justified. 
• Nothing Hamas has done is bad, or a war crime. It’s the expression of anger against the constant oppression. 
• Israel are the Nazis of the Middle East
• Israel is committing war crimes
• Israel is a genocidal state
• Israel is an apartheid state
• Israel must be stopped. Especially from killing children and babies, the innocents in Gaza. 
• There must be a ceasefire: no matter if Israel achieves nothing of its goals, in which no Israeli hostages are released. Israel Defence Forces must retreat from the positions in Gaza. 

This narrative is wrong or warped in all its claims. I’m not going to do a debunk here, as I’ve done that over the years on this blog. In any case I doubt any facts are going to prevail over the emotion and hysteria that grips the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas crowd. “You can’t reason people out of positions that they’ve got to without reason."

What’s really dispiriting is that delivers in the narrative above is a large group and it's growing. And that some people -- including some of my own family and friends -- think that because there are so many people on the streets and the outrage is so great on X, that they must be right, these anti-Israel pro-Hamas people. 

For me, not so. I won’t change my mind on this issue -- just because of large numbers -- unless there’s a good case. And so far, I don’t see the good case for Israel to stop from attacking Hamas terrorists and their venal leaders within Gaza, even if that does have the tragic collateral of killing the children Hamas uses as shields. 

There was so much anti-Israel, pro-Hamas rhetoric on the “For You” setting, so much of it feverish, hysterical, that I’ve switched over in the past few days to “Following” mode. That gives me a soothing relief, just of the 200 or so people that I’ve decided over the years I like to hear from. 

Which is, by the way, why everyone’s X feed is different from everyone else’s. You can’t say “X has become a cesspit”, without it reflecting on the people you follow. Each feed in the over 600 million X feeds is different and unique. At least we know can have our own views, and I in no way want to stop the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas crowd -- a very big one, it seems -- from having their say. 

Just that from time to time (like now), it gets a bit much and I have to tune out for a bit. 

And have to declare, for absolute clarity, that I remain a firm supporter of Israel, a firm hater of Hamas. They are day and night. Hamas is evil; Israel is a flawed democracy. Hamas is bad; Israel is good. 

There, that’s it. 

Morning at the beach: Discovery Bay beach, Hong Kong

 

Looking East to Central, from Discovery Bay

Our Byron, beach camouflage dog

“How the contemporary Chinese art collection of a former Australian ambassador to Beijing was accidentally pieced together via ‘friendship and serendipity’” | SCMP Geoff Raby

Reading and Art, by Shuai Mei

I knew Geoff Raby from before the time he was Australian ambassador to China. I was attached to the embassy in the nineties, as Executive General Manager of Austrade, when Geoff covered economy issues.

I also started collecting Chinese modern artists, early, back in 1990 in Shanghai. Continued collecting until our walls were full.

Geoff clearly went further than his walls being full, as he donated 147 painting to his Alma mater La Trobe Uni in Melbourne. They're now in exhibition in Sydney.

/snip:

Soon after assuming his post as Australian ambassador to China in 2007, Geoff Raby visited a restaurant in Songzhuang, Beijing, and was captivated by what he saw: oil paintings of cheerfully industrious pigs. Read on …

Hamas numbers don’t add up

 

Genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the Middle East

Click above for the video

Summary: In all the lands of the Middle East, genocide has gone on against the Christians, the Zoroastrians, the Buddhists, the Yazidis, and -- let’s not forget -- the Jews. And of this nothing is said.  The one country that is accused of genocide is the one country that neither preaches nor practices genocide. What a cruel irony. Is there a worse irony? A worse hypocrisy? A worse warping of history?

My X feed is full of anti-Israel, anti-semitic rants about how Israel is committing genoncide. It’s a majority. That’s being on the side of Hamas. It’s not “caring for the little children”. For where was the care for the little children of Israel. It’s being anti-Israel and using a word that makes them the worst of the worst: “genocide”. But it’s not. 

Democrats Destroying Democracy To ‘Save Democracy’ | RealClearPolitics

It shocks millions of Americans that a Democrat who ran for attorney general promising to go after a Republican president of the United States is allowed to use the power of the state to go after political opponents, and then take nearly half a billion dollars without proving any financial harm from the misstatements. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/02/19/democrats_destroying_democracy_to_save_democracy_150523.html

Sent from my iPad

Reneging on Reform: China abandons Deng’s policies

I was in China in the 1970s, in that time of Mao Zedong, whose policies led to China" absolute poverty". As has socialism everywhere it's been tried. And as I saw with mine own eyes: in China of the 1970s, in Vietnam and the Soviet Union of the 80s, and in North Korea of always.

The last para in Zhou Xin's article says it all. As I've been saying for decades now: China became rich post 1980 to the exact extent that it allowed private enterprise, the market economy, aka "capitalism", to grow. And now it will impoverish itself, again, to the exact extent that it suppresses the private sector in favour of sluggish, slothish, State Owned Enterprises. 

Shame. But was always in the books. Whenever you have so many bureaucrats, you have an inbuilt tendency to control, aka "socialism". 

The pity in the west is that a majority of our college students say they favour "socialism". A semester in North Korea might sort them out. 

PS: Deng summed his policies in one phrase: "it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice". Nice.

“Chinese-led team’s carbon dioxide conversion system hailed as ‘milestone’ in harnessing No 1 greenhouse gas” | SCMP

Yes, but… 

 
They don't have a commercial version. 

Elon Musk has said: going from prototype to production is more difficult by one or two orders of magnitude: ie, by 10 to 100 times more difficult. And he would know, having brought Tesla EVs and SpaceX satellites to production. 

Planes, trains and vanes

Click above for the photos

China trains from the air, by photographer Wang Lu. 

“Hong Kong through the lens of Post photographers” | SCMP

Click above for the photos

Byron our camouflage dog on Discovery Bay beach yesterday

‘Two-states? It’s not a solution. It’s part of the problem.’ | Douglas Murray

	Douglas Murray ⁦‪@DouglasKMurray‬⁩ 'Two-states? It's not a solution. It's part of the problem.' My column in today's ⁦‪@nypost‬⁩ nypost.com/2024/02/15/opi…   16/2/2024, 7:01 pm

Sent from my iPad

Putin prefers Biden to Trump

Click above for the article 

Couple of points:

Imagine if Vladimir Putin had said he prefers Trump. Cue hysterical meltdown by legacy media.

I wonder how long before they try to deny this. Or obfuscate it. ADDED: turns out not long! Here’s the New York Times.

By the way, “more predictable” is like when Biden said that he didn’t mind if Russia took “just a little bit” of Ukraine. Or predictably dumped ally Saudi Arabia and went all gooey on Iran. That kind of predictable; the kind that harms America and the west. 

“World … to fight back against a real genocide” | Alex Lo, SCMP

Alex Lo in full-on rant mode. All wrong. Eg, from history and today:

Israel is not committing genocide.

Israel is not an apartheid state.

Israel is not a colonialist power.

"Mass cognitive dissonance" is believing Hamas are fine and Israel is evil. As do so many in the west, including Lo himself. It is this that's an "upside-down world"

Meantime: South Africa is not the best placed to take a case to the International Court of Justice. It's deeply corrupt; presidential candidate Julian Malema openly calls for "Kill the Boers", aka "Kill white pigs". Meantime the president of the ICJ, Nawaf Salam, is from Lebanon which is committing what the U.N. has called "war crimes": missiles attacking Israeli civilians. And this ICJ is the court that should judge Israel?

Quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore

https://a.co/4J1aqL6

Tucker Carlson loses moral compass on Gaza, Putin and the US

 

Click above for the video 

Tucker Carlson is an influential conservative commentator. He’s smart and insightful. He’s also a bit kooky. Like, believes in aliens. And other things. In the interview above, in Doha, after his hugely famous interview with Vladimir Putin, he says some smart stuff. And also some stuff that I think is morally wrong. It’s morally wrong, for example, to say that nazis and anti-nazis are the same. They are not. Hamas and the IDF are not the same. They are not brawling children who must be disciplined by “daddy” America, as he bizarrely suggests.

Above is Tucker Carlson, talking in Dubai, with an Egyptian journalist, about his interview of Putin. In which Carlson claims that Putin and Biden are something like the same, because “all leaders kill”, here. Then that Moscow is a beautiful city and this shows the benefit of someone like Putin. Which is kind of like the “at least he got the trains running on time” defence of Mussolini. There are many ways to have a clean and safe city without a dictatorship. 

But mostly it’s at the 49’ mark, where he talks of Gaza and the US is like “dad”, a dad who has couple of unruly kids to discipline . Like Hamas is just a kid. Like Israel is just like another kid. And you have to keep them in check, as the Dad. That’s not only paternalistic, arrogant, imperialist. It’s also plain wrong. Because Hamas is a murderous, genocidal, sectarian, brutal, nazi outfit. And Israel is not. That’s it. Sorry Tucker. Shocked that he says what he says. 

My view: demanding a ceasefire now, just before the IDF enters Rafah, is to demand the preemptive surrender of Israel to the terrorist outfit of Hamas. It’s immoral to demand ceasefire at this time. Yet to the men above this is what’s needed. They lack moral clarity. 

ADDED: in a separate talk with Russel Brand, link here: 

Carlson says America committed war crimes in WW2: the fire bombing of Dresden, the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These he says have made America “Evil” with a “broken soul”. But we who are not Carlson know that these things have been endlessly discussed, the ethics, the morality, the practical need… discussed endlessly since the war, most often in the United States media, academia and politics. And so we know, we who are not Carlson, that contrary to his “broken soul” thesis we have a much deeper understanding of war, of war crimes, of “collective punishment”, of rights and wrongs and through this we know that America is not Evil. Not perfect, but also not evil. 

Moreover Carlson fails to mention that the dropping of two atom bombs set the stage for the next eighty years of no world war, such was the fearsome demonstration effect of the atom bomb

ADDED: critique from another conservative commenter, here. 

“… telling ‘China’s story well’ a struggle on global stage” | Josephine Ma

Reason being: people recognise propaganda. Because they’ve seen it on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBC... 

“When we were led into the gas chamber, YOU said nothing”

	Afshine Emrani MD FACC ⁦‪@afshineemrani‬⁩ When we were led into the gas chamber, YOU said nothing. When we were forcibly converted, YOU said nothing. When we were thrown out of a country just for being Jews, YOU said nothing. When we now defend ourselves all of a sudden, YOU have something to say. How did we take our…   11/2/2024, 4:08 am

Sent from my iPad

Two States Terrible Solution

Click above for the video 
This fellow does good vids, IMO

It’s not just since 1917 that Muslim Arabs have been killing Jews. It’s since Muhammad in the 7th century.

Christopher Hitchens once said that the reason Muhammad hated the Jews is that they laughed at him. It’s true they did. We can read it in the Koran, the Hadith, the Sirah, the biography of Muhammad. 

It’s not surprising. After all, Muhammad was most likely a Paranoid Schizophrenic. He heard voices, the voice of the Angel Gabriel, who apparently recited the Koran to him, an illiterate farmer in !ecca. He was told to hate Jews, so says the Trimity of Islam. He went to Medina to proselytise to the Jews, who in good stand-up schtick giggled and mocked him. To his eternal induration. Which is continued to the day because to Muslims Muhammad is “the perfect man”.

“Israel claims Hamas tunnel found under UN refugee agency Gaza headquarters” | SCMP

IDF soldier in the tunnel under UNRWA HQ
Click above to to to the article 

Anti-Israel voices say that attacking a hospital, a school, a refugee HQ, etc, are war crimes according to international law. 

What these people don't say — they may not know — is that if the enemy, in this case Hamas, ensconce themselves in a hospital, a school, a refugee HQ, etc, it turns that faculty into a valid target, according to the very same international law they quote above. 

Having a Hamas tunnel underneath an UNRWA HQ makes it a valid target. 

Too bad if UNRWA is still there, say I,  given how corrupt it is and has been for decades. (But they're not there, are they? — they left when the IDF warned them they'd bomb the tunnels underneath their compound).

By the way, note the Israel "claims" in the headline. Israel is always the one doubted.

Happy New Year of the Dragon, from the Post’s Harry

It’s all nonsense this Chinese zodiac, as is astrology, but what the heck.

Judge makes American capitalism worse: thoughts on the Musk compensation package voiding

 

Click above to go to the bit about Elon Musk’s compensation package 

Musk haters: “$55 billion in compensation! That’s crazy!”

Me: what’s actually crazy (and harmful) is the judge voiding the compensation package. As the All In Podcast guys explain well. 

What the Musk haters don’t know about the package, discussed above by the smart guys at “All In Podcast”:

1. It’s an all or nothing deal. 100% based on performance, with zero paid if he did not meet extremely aggressive targets

2. The targets to be met, starting in 2018 up to 2023 are: (a) Share price up ten-fold and (b) aggressive revenue targets and (c) aggressive EBITDA targets.

3. The targets were set so aggressively that at the time people called the deal “crazy” and bad for Musk. 

4. That deal was approved by 73% of the shareholders of Tesla

5. Musk hit the targets: to the huge benefit of the shareholders, and to Musk himself. 

6. The payout is NOT simply a big wad of cash. It’s in Tesla shares, which only vest over five years. So, he has to wait for them to vest and can’t simply sell them immediately. 

7. By attacking the package, the judge is in effect encouraging more deals for CEO’s for guaranteed compensation, instead of compensation based on performance. The guys above explain all of this. 

In short, the voiding of his shareholder approved compensation package is “unfair and unAmerican”, as Chamath says. 

BBC: “Israel rejects Hamas peace plan”. Yeah, right

	Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 ⁦‪@MarinaMedvin‬⁩ Hamas has proposed a "deal" for themselves that builds them a kingdom — 1) Hamas stays in power 2) Hamas is supplied with whatever they need 3) Gaza is rebuilt for Hamas 4) Hamas members captured during the war and before are released back into Gaza— 1,500 of them 5) UNRWA…   7/2/2024, 9:41 pm

The Arab world for research and development ran a poll of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank

The polls are in and @ACTBrigitte breaks it down. The Arab world for research and development ran a poll of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Here are the results.

3/4 Palestinians support Hamas’ October 7th massacre.

98% said that October 7th made them proud.

77% want to destroy Israel.

And in the West Bank? Hamas is even more popular.

88% approval rating.

Islamic Jihad 93% support in the West Bank.

98% of Palestinians in the West Bank say they hate America.

96.8% in Gaza hate America.

Oh, and the UK?! 100% said they hate the UK. Yes, you read that right. 100%.

92% hate the EU and 88% hate the UN.

Can you say death cult who hates everyone and wants everyone dead?

As Brigitte so eloquently said “We don’t really believe in evil. Even when we come face to face with it, we make excuses for it.”

Wake up, folks. The Palestinian people have chosen terror over freedom. They have chosen to build a rotten society from the ground up instead of building a flourishing state.

The hard truth is, this isn’t a war between Israel and Hamas. This is a war between the west, represented by Israel, against radical Islam represented by the Palestinian people and their elected government, Hamas.

Numbers don’t lie and the Palestinians have chosen death over life.

China and Norway: joint partners in Palestine delusion

Quote from above: 

“… so that both the Israeli and Palestinian people can enjoy a peaceful and secure life”. 

Sure. And I’d love the catch that unicorn down the back of my garden.

The Palestinian Authority on the West Bank — like Hamas — has a “Money for Murder” policy: any Arab who kills a Jew will be paid a life-stipend. The PA — like Hamas —  calls for the extirpation of Israel, wiping it off the face of the earth; for killing of Jews “wherever they are”. And Hamas is way more popular on the West Bank than are the PA. These are people we’re supposed to negotiate with? To whom Israel should surrender? By making a ceasefire? 

But, you know, “peace, baby”.

As for UNRWA and Norway’s’ support of it, they ought to be ashamed. UNRWA is long known to be the corrupt creatures of Hamas. Not just “some” in UNRWA are Hamas; it’s riddled top to bottom with Hamas. UNRWA are the means the “refugee crisis” has been kept alive for nearly a century, when other refugee crises have been solved ( including the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab countries since 1945).