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| From Discovery Bay, last night, looking towards Central |
Sunday, 27 September 2026
Falcon 9 launch brings tears to the eyes
A SpaceX propulsion engineer brought his elderly father to watch a Falcon 9 launch at Cape Canaveral. His father had been a mechanic his entire life. He had never been to a rocket launch. He didn't understand orbital mechanics or payload deployment. He understood engines.
The engineer had worked on the Merlin engine for 4 years. The Merlin powers the Falcon 9. Every component his team designed was about to fire for 162 seconds and either deliver a satellite to orbit or explode.
The father stood in the viewing area and watched the countdown. When the engines ignited and the rocket lifted off the pad, the sound hit them 6 seconds later. The ground shook. The father grabbed his son's arm. Not from fear. From recognition. He knew engines. He had spent 45 years listening to them. This engine was different from anything he had heard in his life.
The father didn't speak for the entire ascent. When the first stage separated and the booster began its descent back to the landing pad, the father started crying. The mechanic who had spent 45 years under cars and trucks watched a rocket engine fire in reverse to land itself upright on a pad from the edge of space.
He turned to his son and said "you built that?"
The engineer said it was the single greatest moment of his career. Not the launch. Not the landing. The question. His father, a man who understood engines better than anyone he knew, looking at the most advanced engine ever built and asking his son if he built it.
Elon's vision of Mars is abstract to most people. But the moment a mechanic's son brought his father to watch the engine he built change the world is the moment the mission becomes human. It's not about Mars. It's about a father who finally understood what his son had been doing all those years.
H/t Race
Homelessness: the more you spend, the more you get
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| Source: San Francisco Department of Health |
When governments give money to Charities based on the number of homeless they cater to, the charities have zero incentive to reduce the number of homeless they cater to. Quite the opposite.
California spent $24 Billion in the last five years only to see homelessness increase the state increase.
The solution?
Tough Love. Force — yes, force — homeless into shelters, either mental or drug rehabilitation. Align incentives with desired outcomes. Re-engage the government, city or state, to do it, rather than NGOs, which have been corrupted by the flood of money and will be hard to reform.
Saturday, 26 September 2026
Islam is Islam. Islamism is Islam. Islam is Islamism.
An Occasional Reader asks me what I think about a recent article in the The Economist, "The truth and the lies about Islam in Europe", subtitled "Islam poses no serious danger. But Islamism and the fear of Islam do."
In a word: Bunk.
I've written on this subject since the very beginning of this blog. Because, since the beginning, there have been people desperate to find something nice about Islam. To find something to give hope that we may be able to co-exist peacefully with a supremacist religion and hit upon this formula: the one that The Economist is belatedly pushing on us: "It's not Islam, it's Islamism!". There we go, problem solved.
No, it's not.
Think about it. The formulation "Islam is no danger; Islamism is" makes about as much sense as saying "Communism is no danger; Communists are".
I wrote again about this on 10th September this year, the eve of 911 in "There is NO moderate Islam | True Truths on the eve of 911", where I said:
Can I ever forget, twenty five years ago, early evening here in Hong Kong, when we heard that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center? The North Tower. And then a second plane. Which we saw live, in real time, before even the CNN reporter who was face-to-camera, back to the burning North Tower. At which I turned to my wife and said “it’s got to be Al-Qaeda”.
Can we forget?
Can I ever forget the next day, president Bush standing on the smoking rubble, declaring “we’ll get them”? But also declaring “Islam is a religion of peace”.
At which I thought “huh?”. How does that square with what we’ve just seen? How can it be a “religion of peace” when we already knew, to a moral certainty, that men driven by this very religion had done it? Had hijacked and flown planes into two towers full of innocent people?
Which started me on my quest to learn about this “religion of peace”. On my first reading of the Quran. Of the Hadith. Of the Sirah of Muhammad. Of the Umdat Al-Salik, the Classic Manual of Islamic Jurisprudence. And my library, now in the many hundreds, of books on Islam from the apologetics to the critical.
I concluded early on that “Islam is Islam”. Its most pious votaries say so. Its religious leaders say so. Its political leaders say so. All knowledgeable observers say so.
At the same time I recognised the tactical reason for saying there’s “Islam” and there’s “Islamism”. Tackling the massive thing that is worldwide Islam is too tough. Tackling a subset is more doable.
We’ve now reached a point in the west where the dangers of Islam to our societies, to our freedoms and tolerance are so apparent that we have to face the real truth. The uncomfortable truth. That the problem is Islam itself. The problem is its doctrines. Its values. That it’s an ideology more than it is a religion. That that ideology is incompatible with western enlightenment values.
It's simply not true that Islam itself is "no serious danger". As I've shown by data, there is no country in the world that has over 7% of its population that is Muslim, and which has a perfect score on the Human Development Index which measures a wide variety of social and political freedoms. The more the percentage of Islam, the lower the rank of Human Development. See my: “Freedom and Islam; a statistical survey”
It's The Economist that's not telling us the truth on this. It's The Economist that's telling us the lie, in a mildly reworked format, that "Islam is not the danger", that Islam is a "Religion of Peace".
As Christopher Hitchens noted, "the extremists of a 'Religion of Peace', will be extremely peaceful". Sadly, we know, to our cost in blood and toil, that the opposite is the case.
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"Islam or Islamist", my post of 31 October 2011
Want more? Punch in Islamism to the Search Box on the right, and you'll come up with many pieces I've posted since starting this blog in 2009.
Shorter me: You can find subtle differences between "Islam" and "Islamism". But they are small and essentially meaningless. As in:
"Islamism is the snake in the grass. Islam is the grass".
“Britain’s Inertia Is a Warning to America”| Charles C.W. Cooke
Britain’s inertia is also a warning to Australia.
Australia, currently sitting somewhat uncomfortably, gazing around, a deer-in-the-headlights, between the success of America and the ennui of Britain; between the vibrancy of the United States and the inertia of a Dis-United Kingdom.
All while we lean precariously towards China, away from our most formidable partner, our most powerful ally with whom we share enlightenment values. Yet we lean Sinical nonetheless because, you know, Trump. Who Tweets Horrid Things.
Charles C.W. Cooke:
In recent years, I have been privy to the curious trend of Europeans who, having been assiduously fed all manner of nonsense about life in the United States, have come to understand that their presumptions were all wrong. In yesterday’s London Telegraph, Allister Heath describes this phenomenon rather well. Beneath the pull-no-punches headline, “I saw a breathtaking glimpse of what Britain could have become,” Heath offers a blunt challenge to the smug among his fellow countrymen:
If you want to comprehend the scale of Britain’s decline, our economic, geopolitical and technological humiliation, the magnitude of the self-sabotage inflicted upon our nation by our incompetent political class, head to one of America’s booming Republican-run Red States.
It will guarantee a shock to your system, and jolt you out of any residual complacency. It will simultaneously energise you and plunge you into depression. You will be blown away by the growth, the clatter of construction, the siege of cranes across the skyline, the massive cars, the energy, drive and ambition, the wealth, abundance and cheap energy, the entrepreneurial go-getting, the ostentatious celebration of success.
Read it all at: “Britain’s Inertia Is a Warning to America” by Charles C.W. Cooke.
Friday, 25 September 2026
Loving Australia... all over again
We're just back, Jing and I, from ten days down in Australia. Mainly to see my Mum who turned 105 last Tuesday. Imagine! And still going. Still putting on lippie, a very nice dress and pearls. Our dear Mutti.
And family. And old friends.
It's spring in the antipodes; spring was springing and singing everywhere. On the train from Sydney to Canberra, a tootle and a pleasantly slow doddle at four hours for the 300 km, we watch the bush brush past, on either side, yellow with wattle.
Choo-choo, choo-choo. Past Yerrinbool, Bingara, Mittagong, Bowral, Burradoo. All bloomin' wattle. And bloomin' lovely indigenous names too, aren't they?
South of Goulburn, Wollogorang, another lovely name, flows off the tongue, then Lake George, for decades dry, sheep grazing on its bed, now flows itself, full of water. The land is green. Usually khaki, olive, grey, now lime-greens, shot through with the everywhere wattle.
The crabapple too is out:
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| My sister Anne’s Crabapple, Ainslie, Canberra |
In the mornings, Magpies sing and chuckle, prancing around in their dinner suits and bow ties, for titbits on the lawn. Afternoons, the Eastern and the Crimson Rosellas reach for a worm, and hold it to eat. Sulphur-crested Cockatoos crack seeds, loudly. The Galahs come shouting through -- "makeway... makeway...". What a cacophony, the delightful ever-changing noise of the Aussie bush.
The people we find -- after an absence of nearly a decade -- friendly, open, helpful. Smiling. It's not just Thailand that's the "Land of Smiles". We reckon Australia is too.
When I'm back in Hong Kong, I mention this to a Thai friend. Who says "well, yeah, of course, but you're Aussie". I say, not but it's also my wife, from China originally, who feels it. She used to feel "like a foreigner" when she first came to Oz, thirty some years ago. Today, not. She's just an Aussie, too.
There's so many now from all over, and especially from Asia. Being asianised myself, now, after 40+ years in China and Hong Kong, I feel it too, and it's comfortable.
We arrive at our rented apartment in Kirribilli, on the north shore of Sydney. It's on the top floor with no lift. We've got a 25kg suitcase, and me 77 yo.
There's a young guy doing some reno. He offers to help. I don't ask; he offers. Thanks mate, that's much appreciated. He's from Fiji, name of Jerry, looks like a rugby forward. I say this. Yeah, he replies, I used to play footy... in New Zealand. Picks up the suitcase like it's a rugby ball, and marches up five flights of stairs. Doesn't expect anything. Thanks, mate, you're a champ, I say. No worries. 'Ave a good one. And he's off, back to work.
Same at departure. This time it's a young bloke, name of Spike, who says No Worries, I used to do removals. And picks up the case to march it down the steps. Again, expecting nothing but a "thanks mate", to which he's: "no worries. Have a good trip".
"No worries". The best of Oz.
The land. The flora. The fauna. The people. The friends. The family. The beauty of it all.
We're loving it. All over again.
Thursday, 24 September 2026
John Cleese can say whatever the hell he likes about Islam! | Brendan O’Neill
Imagine devoting 65 years of your life to entertaining the nation only to be told by a gang of pious pricks that you’re no longer welcome in England’s second city. That’s been the fate of the great John Cleese. He’s given us six decades of comedy, yet still he finds himself mobbed by hysterics who want to muzzle his wisecracking mouth. His crime? You already know. Everyone knows. It’s the same thing every time. He took the piss out of Islam.
Cleese is touring England with a live stage show celebrating Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He screens the 1975 movie and takes questions from the audience. That’s a pretty stand-up thing for a comedy giant in his late 80s to be doing. Not in the eyes of Islamo-narcissists, though. They’re amazed Cleese can even show his face in public following his numerous sins of blasphemous thought. Nothing makes the pious wet their pants like a comic chortling at their superstitions.
Cleese took his show to the Islamic Republic of Birmingham on Sunday night. News of the blasphemer’s arrival caused a wave of horror
Muslims Say It's Unfair To Judge Their Entire Religion Based On The Actions Of Several Million
WORLD — The international Muslim community issued a collective statement this week explaining that it would be unfair to judge their religion based on the bad actions of several million of its members.
Despite decades of repeated violent attacks in various parts of the world that have taken the lives of many thousands of innocents, Muslims urged the world's population not to judge the religion harshly based on the actions of such a large number of them.
Motorcades for illegals | Tom Slater
Extraordinary scenes along coastal England this week. Convoys of buses, escorted by police, lights and sirens blaring, like a presidential motorcade, but to meet illegal immigrants and escort them to taxpayer-funded accommodations. In places where not even nice, empathetic, middle class, Lib-Dem voters want to see them.
Tom Slater. “The Gosport protests have put Burnham on notice”.
/Snip:
For what has been taking place across the English Channel is not ‘asylum seeking’ in any meaningful sense. Even Rory Stewart is now saying that anyone who is fleeing, for all intents and purposes, France has no real right to claim asylum in Britain. This is a funnel for illegal migration – and everyone knows it.
The government can bang on about its legal obligations all it likes – to aid vessels in distress, to process those who claim asylum here, to house those who have made a claim.
What the public sees is illegal migrants being escorted into our waters, landed on our soil and put up at our expense. Because beyond the legal niceties of the situation, that is precisely what is happening here.
A video of the “motorcade” for illegal immigrants. (aka “undocumented migrants”).
Earlier, at Portsmouth.
Will AI kill us all?
Serious question. Entertained, seriously, discussed and debated by some of the smartest human minds on earth.
Herbert Ong talks to Joe Bhakdi. With clips from some of the big thinkers on Artificial Intelligence today.
Tectonic shifts coming. Real soon. With non-zero chance of catastrophe. You’re not a neo-Luddite if you think this.
Another “one divides into two” split. This one the biggest ever. You’re either for AI or for Homo Sapiens. I’m for humans. Messy and all as we are.
Meanwhile: “Don’t fear the Doomer hoax” from the besties at the All-in podcast.
Wednesday, 23 September 2026
Heaven is …
… a dog at one’s feet.
In this case our Labradoodle, Byron. Who was so happy to see us back from Oz. He howled with happiness. His ❤️ bursting with love. Ours too…
Tesla and SpaceX will be the world’s largest companies | Ron Baron
Money where mouth award: to Ron Baron. $30+ Billion in stocks of Tesla and SpaceX, via his top-performing Baron One Fund, AND he privately owns a further $6 Billion stock in the two companies.
That’s commitment. As Ron makes clear, it’s a commitment to Elon Musk himself. Example: Whatever decision Elon makes re a merger of SpaceX and Tesla, he, Ron, will support it.
I’m with Ron. I’m an Elon fan boy. Even though I don’t believe everything Elon envisions can happen. Humans living on Mars, for example. Or going to the Stars (Ad Astra). These seem to be beyond the laws of physics. Even as they serve as monster stretch goals, inspiring visions.
************
Grok summary of Ron’s main points:
Tesla:
- “The time to buy Tesla is now.” His pitch is FSD, not just selling more cars.
- FSD is going mainstream: ~1.4–1.5M users, ~55% YoY growth, and ~55% of new buyers taking it at delivery. He says it will be “everywhere.”
- People will want a Tesla, not just an EV — market share improving as legacy makers pull back; he called the driving experience (his Model S stopping for ducklings) a reason everyone will want it.
- Already sized up: firm ~$5B Tesla vs ~$25B SpaceX; asked if he’d buy more, he said that’s enough. He discussed a possible SpaceX–Tesla combination with Musk but wouldn’t share the arguments.
- Batteries, energy, robots. All big or potential huge, parts of Tesla. Which Ron doesn’t even include in his bullish outlook.
SpaceX:
- Starlink could be a $1T revenue business in ~10 years, with $700–800B of EBITDA, supporting a $14–15T valuation for Starlink alone vs SpaceX at under $2T today. [= 7 times its current value]
- Consumer broadband is only part of it; government, enterprise, and mobile make up most of the extra revenue, which is why the constellation plan moved from 20k toward 100k satellites.
- Cheaper launches (Falcon already cut cost/kg sharply; Starship aims far lower) make that scale possible.
- Second act: data centers in space — free solar power, vacuum cooling, less political/grid constraint — to serve AI compute demand, potentially starting around 2027 and worth multiple extra trillions if it works.
Tuesday, 22 September 2026
Islam is ruining Britain
I’ve been banging on about the threat of Islam to western societies for the best part of two decades now.
So how’s about I let someone else bang on about it. Tim Dieppe in this case. Whose article below draws on his new book “The Challenge of Islam”. It’s long, but worth the read.
If anything he’s too measured. Shouldn’t his book be “The Threat of Islam”, for example, rather than “The Challenge…”? His critique too polite and mannerly. It’s time for a bit of blood and fire in the rhetoric, no? And also to say clearly “what we should do about it”.
I’m churlish though to say this. For Dieppe’s is a thorough survey of the issues and challenges. An almost exhaustive listing of what’s happening to Blighty, as a result of its own policies.
Dieppe quotes Sir Trevor Phillips:
‘Sir Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, acknowledged in 2016 that ‘the integration of Muslims will probably be the hardest task we have ever faced’.
The hardest! Harder than The Hundred Years War. Harder than the Plague. Harder than two World Wars. “The integration of Muslims”. All through deliberate choice of policies.
Which means: It did not have to be this way.
There must be a lesson for my own Australia here. We must not let it get to anywhere near this stage in Oz. So far, we haven’t. But it seems we have some kind of death wish for Islam. Some kind of precautionary Sharia Supplication.
I do want to be wrong. Please, Australia. Look and learn. Prove me wrong.
From Dieppe:
Monday, 21 September 2026
Beware of China | Kevin Rudd
Carrying on the great political tradition of ‘never buggering off’, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is back – sort of – offering advice.
To my great annoyance, he might even have a point.
Taking a momentary break from the substantial role of Global President and CEO of the Asia Society, Kevin Rudd appeared at the National Press Club.
Who better, I hear you say, to steer Labor through difficult geopolitical waters than the man with friendly knives embedded in his suit jacket?
Suffice to say he is not on the ‘comeback trail’. (Rudd hinted that Tony Abbott might be.) He is also not running for UN Secretary General because ‘Malcolm [Turnbull] took care of that last time round’.
Kevin Rudd gave a sermon on the rise of China, calling for a ‘radical change in our national psychology’ and a new sense of ‘national urgency’.
Describing Australia as a ‘complacent country’,
English-language coverage of China: disappearing
I’ve followed and supported Manya Koetse for years.
See below and support if you value independent English language coverage of issues re China and the World.
On a separate but related note, it’s regrettable to see more English-language China-focused projects disappear. WIRED has discontinued Made in China, the newsletter created by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis. The podcast China Decode, co-hosted by Alice Han and James Kynge, has been shut down due to a lack of advertising support. |
Independent reporting on China is becoming harder to sustain at a time when it matters more than ever. There is more fast China news than ever, but deeply researched work is struggling, while readers are seeing more hot takes for clicks and biased coverage serving political agendas. |
So this is both a reminder and a personal appeal: please subscribe to the newsletters and podcasts you value, where independent creators actually invest time, effort, and expertise into China-related research. We need your support to keep doing this work. Without it, more independent voices will disappear. (You can join as a paying member to this newsletter here). |
Sunday, 20 September 2026
Australia be like…
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| Canada and PM Carney’s idea of “associate relationship” with the EU |
Australia be like…
… Canada (above), but looking at China instead of the EU.
At least from many talks here in Oz. And debates on the ABC. Australia is leaning to … China!
Such is the hate for Trump across Australia, Aussies now hate their main ally, their long-time ally, their strongest ally. While casting lurid, loving glances at tyrannical communists. Sinical, no?
“What Have the Muslims Ever Done for Us?”
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| Hmmmm… |
Except, of course, what has Islam ever done for us? Except— to be 100% clear! — to diminish and destroy their host countries…
Saturday, 19 September 2026
We’re Doomed !!
Cassandra warned the Trojans about the wooden horse – she was given the power to see the future, but was cursed that no one would believe her. In Silicon Valley’s version of this story, the Trojan horse is superintelligence, and its Cassandras warn that AI researchers are “gambling with our lives” in the race to build it.
But there’s a twist, Geoffrey Cain writes in this issue’s cover story.
The ending stays the same, but first, instead of ignoring the Cassandras, “the elders hear them out, agree with every word.” The people who most vocally proclaim that AI might kill us are also insisting that they must be the ones to “pace” its development. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has said that AI development must slow down; OpenAI’s Sam Altman agrees, as does Elon Musk, who has warned that humanity is “summoning the demon.”
Investors give them billions to continue building their “safer” machines. And so the Trojan horse – slightly hobbled by regulation, accompanied by auditors – will trundle along, straight through the gates.
Friday, 18 September 2026
Thursday, 17 September 2026
Piddington and the idiocy of middle-class progressivism
The result is in. Ninety-two per cent of the voters in the tiny Oxfordshire village have voted to secede from the United Kingdom – 285 yes, 26 no. Why? Because the British government plans to dump hundreds and hundreds of small boat ‘asylum seekers’ in a military base slap bang next to the Piddingtonians.
Of course, this is a symbolic gesture. There is no legal mechanism to actually achieve secession, which is perhaps just as well. As we know, it’s hard enough to get British politicians to acknowledge the results of an official national referendum, let alone a wildcat local one.
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