Jing and Judah. Judea & Samaria. Dead Sea. Israel. April 2017

Sent from my iPad

“Patriotic Brits are Far-right fascists” | Keir Starmer

Giles Udy is a historian of the Soviet Union. With a focus on “Uncle Joe” Stalin.

Today professor Udy’s focus is on Stalin’s near namesake, British PM Keir Starmer. Who’s also Stalin’s ideological thinksake. Starmer would’ve loved Uncle Joe. As a psst editor of the Marxist Legal Journal, Keir did love Uncle Joe Stalin. 

Giles Udy:

As a Soviet historian who has spent years writing about the extreme, repressive control Soviet Communism exercised over its unfortunate citizens, I find it really hard to bring a similar  accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.

But I’m finding it increasingly difficult to avoid that conclusion. 

We have no Gulag or death penalty, admittedly, but what Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to the total control over all those who do not share their worldview.

And like the Soviets of old their tools of control are the same…

- legislation and co-opted courts and civil service to apply it

- the policing of dissent, by hate crime orders, arrests (@glinner), the long term seizure of electronic appliances (@CF_Farrow) to intimidate even those against whom no charges are finally brought. 

- controlling free speech (12,000 arrests annually for social media posts in 2025). George Orwell’s ‘thought crime’ persecution has become a reality under Labour. 

- framing dissent (the Unite the Kingdom participants) as racism and far right fascism (Stalin started that in the days when Labour was his captive party, the 1930s, and ‘fascist’ has remained their favoured mantra ever since) 

- attacking and weakening the family (because the family is so often a place where small ‘c’ conservative values are transmitted down the generations), including the promotion of trans ideology to confuse children in their understanding of the roles of men and women, mothers and fathers. In their eyes women can have penises and ‘heteronormativity’ must be ‘smashed’. 

- education, wrested as Marx decreed, from the middle class (private schools and VAT), and used as a vehicle for the state propagandising of children and youth at their most vulnerable age.

… and much more.

In short, I can reach no other conclusion. Under Labour, Britain is becoming a repressive state which is, incredibly, echoing the very characteristics of repression that any former resident of the Soviet Union or its satellite states would recognise today (and they do and tell us so)

And with every opportunity Keir Starmer has to rein that in, he instead doubles down. Month by month things get worse.

This is 2026. I can’t believe what I am seeing. Or what I’m saying. But, yes, it is going on. And only a majority government of either Tories or Reform (and I do have reservations about both) of a coalition of two can reverse this. 

… or we are sunk.

Link to the post… 

“The Best Engineers want to work for Elon” | Gavin Baker

Tesla staff pic, 2024*

“The Best Engineers want to work for Elon” 

This includes the Best Engineers from China, Korea, Japan, India. Australia even. In addition to the United States, of course. And the ROW. 

So says Gavin Baker clipped by @Jawwwn.(“co-signed” by Marc Andreessen). 

Have a look at any group pic of staff at any one of Elon’s companies. They’re very diverse. But not because he hires based on some DEI agenda. Because he doesn’t. He hires strictly on competency. 

A long-time SpaceX employee said that the first thing he noticed about his colleagues was their “shocking competence”.

@davidsenra: 

SpaceX's shocking competence:

"Somebody I know once worked for @SpaceX and they were asked what it was like, and he said, "It's like being dropped into a zone of shocking competence."

Everybody is ultra competent.

And the reason everybody's ultra competent is because if they're not, Elon sniffs it out and fires them.

Elon's talking to the people actually doing the work. At this point having done this for 25 years he can sniff this out really quickly.

The best engineers in the world want to work for him because he's the one CEO who's able to work with them as a peer on whatever the technology is.

What would be better as an engineer than being able to design a rocket with @elonmusk as your engineering partner?"

Gavin Baker says that many people got upset at Elon because he supported Trump in the 2024 elections. So that they “don’t think clearly” about him. This, a man doing more than any single individual on earth to reduce carbon emissions, to bring back to America high-paying blue-collar jobs, even higher paying high-tech jobs, to bring internet to the world, to restore human abilities via the Neuralink company, to reduce urban congestion via The Boring Company. Let alone his lofty space goals. To make humankind multi-planetary. 

It’s crazy to hate in a man doing so much for humanity just because you don’t agree with his politics. Which, just by the way, are shared by a majority of Americans. 

By contrast, in East and South Asia, “Elon is a deity”. Says Gavin. True, that. We saw it during Trump’s recent visit to China. Where Chinese tech giants queued to get selfies with Elon.

====================

*Diverse staff, yes. Though I do notice there’s not too many women in this pic. 

Explained by: women do not choose to take STEM subjects as often as men do. It’s a choice. It’s a choice women make everywhere with strong gender equality. Like Scandinavia. It’s just a thing. Women don’t get as much of a kick building things as men do. 

The Left dominates education … and Everything

The figures above are for the whole university academics. In some schools the skew is even stronger. In liberal arts for example, it’s something like 97% who self-define as Left.

It’s true that The Left has won. It’s won education, media, government. 

Yet still, you can get a Trump. Or a Milei. Or a One Nation.

We’ve never tried TRUE Communism

Oh yes, we have!

I’ve written repeatedly about this over the years, most recently, here and here.

I count 32 countries that tried, or are still trying, some form of socialism or communism, not just the 20 mentioned by Brivael le Pogam, Mind you, that’s an unimportant quibble. He’s spot on with everything else. Sadly, logic and experience don’t seem to count for much amongst today’s Left….

Here’s Brivael, translated from the French:

The next time you see a lost soul defending economic socialism or communism as a model of virtue, share this post with them. It might prevent another slaughter.

“We’ve never really tried true communism.”

Yes, we have. We tried. About twenty times. On four continents. For a century. And we have the numbers.

China, Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Independent historians who’ve accessed provincial archives converge on a range of 30 to 45 million deaths. Frank Dikötter (University of Hong Kong), drawing from CCP archives, tallies 45 million, including 2.5 million beaten to death or executed by the militia. Yang Jisheng, former Xinhua agency journalist, after ten years of investigation, counts 36 million in Tombstone. Chinese historian Yu Xiguang, after twenty years of research, reaches 55 million. To put it in scale: that’s the total deaths of World War II, concentrated over four years, in a single country, without war.

USSR. Holodomor 1932–1933, planned famine in Ukraine, recognized as genocide by the European Parliament on December 15, 2022. Gulag, Great Purges 1936–1938, forced displacements of entire populations. The tally in The Black Book of Communism comes to around 20 million deaths for the entire period.

Cambodia, Pol Pot. About 2 million deaths in under four years, nearly a quarter of the population. S-21, Choeung Ek, forced evacuation of cities in a matter of days.

North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, communist Africa, Latin America. Several more million piled up.

Global tally from The Black Book of Communism: about 100 million deaths. Figure echoed in 2006 by Resolution 1481 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and in 2023 by a resolution in the European Parliament. You can debate the margin—80, 90, 100 million depending on methodologies—but as Laurent Joffrin wrote in Libération, hardly suspected of pandering to the right: at 60 million instead of 100, would communism become presentable?

And the “gentle” counter-example? Venezuela. No gulags, no planned famine. Just the methodical application of the program. Result over ten years: GDP contracted by over 75% between 2014 and 2021—the largest economic contraction in peacetime in 45 years, according to the Institute of International Finance. Annual inflation of 130,060% in 2018 according to the Central Bank of Venezuela itself, exceeding 1,000,000% the same year per the IMF. Nearly 8 million people—about 25% of the population—fled the country. The largest exodus in the history of the Western Hemisphere over the last 50 years, according to the OAS and UNHCR. In 2024, 82% of Venezuelans lived in poverty, with 53% in extreme poverty.

Zero exceptions. Zero counter-examples.

Every time, the same mechanism. A self-proclaimed virtuous caste seizes power in the name of the people, and ends up as a nomenklatura holed up in dachas while 99% of the population queues for bread. When Maduro handed out his CLAPs—militarized rationed food boxes—it was the same logic as Brezhnev in the nomenklatura’s reserved stores, sixty years later, under a different flag.

Hayek predicted it all in 1944, in The Road to Serfdom. And Mises even earlier, in 1920, with the economic calculation problem: when you replace market prices with central planning, you destroy the only mechanism capable of aggregating the dispersed information in millions of heads. So you need an authority to decide for everyone. That authority can’t know what it claims to plan, so it imposes by force. And since it always fails—see Venezuela, which followed the sequence to the letter: price controls via the 2014 Fair Prices Act, then nationalizations, then hyperinflation, then militarized rationing—it has to coerce harder and harder just to survive.

Tyranny isn’t a derailment of socialism. It’s its logical equilibrium.

Market capitalism isn’t perfect. It’s just the only system known in history where millions of strangers cooperate without an armed caste forcing them to.

The dead of Kolyma, the Laogai, S-21, and the streets of Caracas ask you not to start over. 

I love being wrong—it lets me learn. Ifyou think I’m off on a specific point, tell me in the comments; I read everything.

[Link]

The hypocrisy of Starmer

Keir Starmer told grotesque lies. When he gave his national address on the “Save the Kingdom” rally. Grotesque. Horrid. In-your-face lies. 

And the hypocrisy. Of Two Tier Policing. 

Patrick Christie gives him a sound thrashing. 

“Productivity is Exploding” | Yun-Ta Tsai

Yun-Ta Tsai is a Senior Engineer at Tesla. 

He posts in English (mainly) and in Classical Chinese. A man after my own heart. 

Here’s his thoughts on what’s going on right here in this world, right now. Even as wars and civilisational challenges surround us.

Attempted to write a Steam Engine hype at the era of Industrial Revolution as if it was the age of AI — 

The steam engine breakthrough is insane right now.

Watt’s separate condenser + new GRPO optimization just dropped the 405 hp-class engine. We went from 7 hp → 70 hp → 405 hp+ in basically three years. One machine now does the work of 50+ men or water wheels — nonstop, rain or shine, anywhere.

Textile mills, ironworks, everything scaling 5-10x overnight. Productivity exploding.

This isn’t incremental. It’s automating physical labor at massive scale. Jobs shifting forever. Society about to look unrecognizable.

The Industrial Revolution isn’t coming. It’s here and accelerating faster than anyone predicted.

Terrified. Excited. Both.

What a time to be alive. 🚂💨

Next post about Yun-Ta will be a bit of Confucius.

51% of liberal Americans: “Political violence is justified”

 

How to go from Centre Left to Right wing without changing

 This is how…

From here

Original cartoon by Colin Wright, via Elon Musk.

You stay where you are. The Left moves Faaaar Left.

London Erupts | Winston Marshall (et. al.)

 

Saturday 16 May, 2026. “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London draws tens of thousands. Organised by long-time activist Tommy Robinson and reported on by ex Mumford & Sons frontman Winston Marshall.

They Rally to support pro-Britain values. Against uncontrolled mass immigration. Their vibe is diverse and somewhat Christian. Their flags are British: England, Wales, Scotland. The Union Jack. And the traditional flag of Iran, the pre-Islamist, pre-1979, one. 

On the same day, there’s a counter demo. People who believe the main threat to Britain is not uncontrolled mass immigration, but the reaction to it, which they call “racism”. While they fly the “Palestinian” flag —purloined from the Arab League, an avowedly racist organisation — and the flag of the supremacist (and racist!) terrorist-theocrat regime of Iran. They hand out the Quran. They are pro Islamist. Pro Hamas. Anti-Israel.

Their vibe is Islam, support for the Iranian theocracy and for its terror proxies. 

Their chant, of Tommy Robinson, “Shoot him in the neck like Charlie Kirk”. Lovely folk. 

Click top video for Winston’s very balanced coverage of the day. Rather too balanced, if I’m honest, but there it is… 

Please can we remember: across Europe, the U.K., the U.S., Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere, 75% of the electorates want a reduction in mass migration. That’s been steady for years. Yet the politicians in those countries, America aside, ignore the Broad Masses.

Other reports:

“UK is saved”. Tal Oran

“Black Brits support Unite the Kingdom rally” Greg Foreman, Black Conservative Perspective 

“Tommy Robinson interview before the rally” Rebel News

“Keir Starmer tried to block rally” Tal Oran

“Brits want their country back” Nick Shirley

“Starmer attacks ordinary Brits” Sky News Australia 

“Islamist aims in Britain and the West” Ali Tabrizi

“Keir Starmer’s reckoning” Douglas Murray (AI)

“Disgraceful Keir Starmer” Sky News

French poison. The “logic” that created Woke

An Occasional Reader, an Israeli, resident in Tel Aviv, asked me the other day: “why did the world turn so suddenly and completely against Israel?”. She thought it was “difficult to understand”. 

I said I thought it was easy to explain. Even if each of the individual reasons is complex, the overall is easy to understand. It’s the “Red-Green alliance”. Red being the lefties. Green being Islamist. 

They share a common enemy. The west. 

The West is Enemy to the Reds because they believe in socialism, communism, and so the need to overthrow capitalism. Which means overthrowing the West.

The West is enemy to the Greens because Islam must dominate the whole world. The West defends freedom of religion, especially Judeo-Christianity. So they must overthythe West to overcome their main enemies, the enemies of Allah.

Part of the brainwashing of the Left, so that they buy-in to overthrowing the West, has been “the long march through the institutions” by a soft and sneaky form of Marxism. The Marxism of post-Modernism. Cultural Marxism. Neo-Marxism. 

Which Brivael Le Pogan describes below. Writing in French. Translated by X:

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.

We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.

For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.

That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.

It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.

What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them—that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.

So, forgive us. And back to work. 

H/t @Brivael

”America’s Cultural Revolution” by Christopher Rufo, covers this topic. A good read.

Xena. Round the Island Race, Hong Kong, 2013

Labour Liars and the lying liars that lie…

This is truly revolting to watch in real time. In real time, to our faces, Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, tells bald-faced flat-out lies.

The “Unite the Kingdom” rally is not “far-right”. Not “bigoted”. Not “racist”. These are “people you’d meet down the pub” as one of the, said. Ordinary Brits. Of all colours and all stripes. 

People call for the destruction of Israel. For “kill all whites”. For “we’re not here to take part. We’re here to take over”. These people are all just fine. Especially because they form a nice voting block. That will reliably vote Labour, if Labour kowtows enough. 

Unite the Kimgdom. Unite the West

Keir Starmer does nothing to stop Islamist extremists, convicted terrorists, from entering the U.K. Where they say, openly, “we’re not here to take part. We’re here to take over”. But these are not the threat. The threat are peaceful grannies and kids, peacefully saying “enough is enough”. Some immigration is good. Too much immigration is bad. Measurably so.

The rally, “Unite the Kimgdom” takes place in the U.K. today.

The organisers, Tommy Robinson stresses: be peaceful. Don’t rise to provocations. Don’t wear masks. Don’t wear any covering. All races welcome “black, white or green”. 

Silence of the Dogs

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times puts his name to a Hamas-sourced alllegation abkit mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Including alleged rape by dogs. 

Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz discusses with JNS podcast.

Timed to cover and overwhelm a much more soundly sourced and exhaustive report on the October 7th invasion, mass murder, mass raps, mass tortures. Canine Complicity by silencing the real crimes. 

The New York Times has a long anti Israel and anti Jew history. There’s books about it. I’ve read a couple. The most recent and most authoritative being Bad News by Batya Ungar-Sargon. 

Defending the West | Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager is a brave man. Paralysed below the neck in a horrific fall in the shower… he still speaks up with passion and erudition.

Above he talks of Israel as the tip of the spear in defending the west. And western values of the enlightenment.

Something I’ve banged on about here over many years. It is true. 

Bike, Bird, Bay

Xi to Trump (in Beijing): “We should be partners not rivals”

🚨 XI JINPING TO TRUMP: “WE SHOULD BE PARTNERS, NOT RIVALS”

This was a remarkable moment.

Standing beside President Trump in Beijing, Xi Jinping openly declared:

“China and the United States both stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation.”

Then came the line nobody expected:

“We should be partners, not rivals.”

That is an extraordinary statement considering the years of:

• Trade wars

• Taiwan tensions

• Tech sanctions

• Military build-ups

• Economic confrontation

• Anti-China rhetoric from Washington

Xi also spoke about making 2026 “a historic landmark” for U.S.-China relations.

Translation?

Something much bigger may now be underway behind the scenes.

Because if the world’s two largest powers move from confrontation toward strategic cooperation, the geopolitical map changes overnight.

Markets.

Trade.

Energy.

AI.

Military tensions.

Global alliances.

Everything shifts.

The political establishment spent years framing U.S.-China relations as an unavoidable collision course.

Now suddenly the language coming out of Beijing is partnership, prosperity and cooperation.

That will send shockwaves through the global power structure.

H/t: Jim Ferguson 

Peter Forsythe comment: this is all Chinese duchessing Trump and America. At very best it’s wishful thinking by the likes of Jim Ferguson. At worst it’s delusion. 

Still, one can hope it’s true. That something positive comes out of it. Just hope. Not expectation. 

My mate Musk, in China with president Trump

Elon Musk just defended America better than every politician in Washington combined. [Talking to Joe Rogan]

Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”

One nation on earth held a weapon nobody else had.

Total dominance. Zero competition. No risk of retaliation.

Every empire in history that held that kind of advantage used it.

Rome. The Mongols. The British. The Ottomans.

They conquered until they collapsed.

America had a bigger advantage than all of them combined.

And it rebuilt the countries it just defeated.

Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”

Almost unprecedented?

It had never happened before. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded history.

The Marshall Plan wasn’t foreign aid.

It was the most radical act of restraint any superpower ever committed.

America turned its enemies into allies. Turned rubble into economies. Turned surrender into partnership.

Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a generation.

Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.

Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.

A city in the heart of the nation that just tried to destroy it.

That’s not policy.

That’s a civilization deciding what it is at the exact moment it has the power to be anything.

You’re being told a story right now.

That America is the villain of history.

You hear it everywhere. Media. Universities. Social platforms.

Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”

Every nation on earth has dark chapters. Every single one.

The difference is what a country does when nobody can stop it.

And when nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.

Musk: “The history of China suggests that China is not acquisitive. Meaning they’re not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries.”

Probably right.

China has historically built walls, not fleets.

But the real question isn’t about borders anymore.

We’re approaching a moment that mirrors 1945 in ways nobody has fully processed yet.

AI is going to give a handful of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look quaint.

If someone is going to hold that kind of power, who do you want it to be?

The country that conquered when it could? Or the one that rebuilt when it didn’t have to?

Every alliance. Every trade route. Every economy.

Billions lifted out of poverty.

All of it traces back to one act of restraint that had never been done before.

And carries no guarantee of being repeated.

The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.

It was what it didn’t do after.

H/t Dustin

America is winning. Russia is losing.

In the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States is “losing.” In fact, the president may have already “lost” his “disastrous and irrational war” with the theocrats in Tehran. Trump is reportedly chastened by his failures, and the far-reaching consequences that America will suffer as a result of this epochal setback are only beginning to come into view.

At least, that’s what we’re hearing from the highest echelons of American public life. Yet, as military historian John Spencer recently observed, these are subjective appraisals. Wars are not won or lost in the comments section, and victors are not determined by vibes alone. Rather, they should be “judged through military capability, economic endurance, political cohesion, freedom of action, strategic leverage, and the ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s.”

 "What it Looks Like When a Great Power is Losing a War..." Noah Rothman

I've followed John Spencer for a while now. He strikes me as very sound. West Point grad. The article above goes on to describe how the great power losing a war, right now, is Russia. 

Let's tease out those 6 John Spencer factors and see how we think the United States is doing against them.

• Military capability
• Economic endurance
• Political cohesion
• Freedom of action
• Strategic leverage
• Ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s

I would give the U.S. full marks for all of these, except for "political cohesion". 

IOW, America is winning. Russia, is losing in all six factors. 

As for "Political cohesion" nothing this Trump administration can do will be fine with these Dems, so there's no cohesion there. But there is cohesion within the Republican party, which is around 85% in support of the war against the IRGC regime in Iran. That support has remained steady since the beginning. 

Meantime what of the "political cohesion" on the Iranian side? We don't know. At least, I don't know. But the signs do seem to indicate: chaos. They've lost about three tiers of leadership. Imagine if your country lost all its top leaders. Then all the deputies. Then all the deputies' deputies. 

So, comparatively, America wins on that criterion as well. America is winning in all 6 of the critical factors identified by Spencer. I say that's America winning. The only thing that can stop a final victory is misjudgement from Trump, or lack of patience from the American public. 

Sympathy for the Devils

Mushroom clouds over Jerusalem. The Tucker “imminent threat”

The wolf really is there. 

So, No.

We cannot allow Iran’s “imminent nuclear threat” be a mushroom cloud over Jerusalem. Or Tel Aviv. 

No matter how much the Jew-hating Hamas and Jew-hating Western Hamasnics may pine for it. To “liberate Palestine”. To “globalise the intifada”.

Emily Schrader of JNS TV explains why in the above vid. And how much Israel has done to stop Iran’s nuclear threat. A threat to the world, by the way, not just to Israel.

It’s not “crying wolf “. You see the wolf in a distant copse. It’s approaching. You fire warning shots and build defences. It keeps coming. You keep firing and defending. That’s why the wolf hasn’t arrived. Not because it’s not there. But because you kept it at bay. Then comes the day you must kill it. Which is where we are today.

Aid to Israel is not a thing

Emily destroys the furphy that a few billions a year in U.S. tied aid is somehow critical to Israel. It’s not. It’s been steadily reduced over the years, with no ill effect on Israel. Bibi Netanyahu has announced he will stop it entirely. Good. 

Emily shows Tucker Carlson predicting this or that. I remember Carlson making wild predictions about all sorts of things, which turned out just as wildly wrong. 

• How Israel would collapse without U.S. aid. 
• Trump killing arch-terrorist Qasem Soleimani in 2020 was going to lead to regional war. 
• Trump’s “Midnight Hammer” operation in June 2025 was going to lead to World War III. 
• The “Epic Fury” operation would fail at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives. 

None of Carlson’s perfervid imaginings is true. None is acknowledged. None apologised for. 

Tucker Carlson is a foolish empty vessel. He is loud only because his very emptiness echoes and reverberates his delusions. 

“Socialists”. By Thomas Sowell

 

Professor Thomas Sowell, professor emeritus of Economics, Cornell, Brandeis, UCal.

I would add to his quote above: Socialists not only don’t have an interest in how wealth is created. They also do not understand how it is created. Take AOC, for example, on a recent podcast she said “you can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t. So you have to cheat”. Her podcast host nodded along in agreement.

ADDED: When I went to find a link to AOCs statement, the top result is this one. Which is by AOC herself. So, despite being roasted in the comments on the original post, she posts a Short, clearly believing that she’s made a strong point. Whereas it’s a dumb, incoherent, ignorant take. I guess she’s counting on her followers being equally dumb, nodding along like the pod host.

Of course you don’t earn a billion dollars. You create it. Take Elon Musk for example. The very first company he founded, in 1995, was Zip2. Set up literally in his garage. He created software to help people find services on the then-new internet. He invented the technology that makes your online Google map show more and more detail the more you scroll in. Vector-based mapping, it’s called. Elon invented that. And it had value.

This service was so valuable that the then-huge PC company, Compaq, bought Zip2. Elon could have retired with the money. Instead he invested in a new online payments method which we now know of as PayPal. That was sold to eBay for billions, so valuable was its service. Again Elon could have retired.

Instead he took all the money, every cent, and invested in two new start ups: Tesla and SpaceX. For these to succeed Musk had to sleep on the factory floor. Working 120 hour weeks. Working on a start up he says is like “chewing broken glass and staring into the abyss”. 

These companies provided goods and services ies that people want. Their stock price went up. So, therefore, did Elon’s wealth. Which he continues to use to create more companies, with more goods and services that people want and pay for. Companies like Neuralink, helping handicapped people regain mobility and speech. Like the Boring company, digging tunnels for better inner city transport. Like Solar City, expanding solar power. Like Grok and Grokipedia, LLM assistants. Like Optimus robots that will help an ageing population.

All that seems lost on the likes of AOC. And her fellow travellers, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani and their socialist ilk.They seem to think that billionaires wallow in their billions in cash, like Scrooge McDuck.

Also, between them, between these four infamous socialist, count the number of jobs they’ve created. It’s a simple answer: Zero. Not a single one of them has created a single job, in their whole life of living off the government that. 

The socialists’ failure to understand how wealth is created…

It’s weird. And stupid. And dangerous. 

Kind Lies vs Unkind Truths

Kind Lie = What sounds good (e.g. Socialism) 

 Unkind Truth = What works (e.g. Capitalism)

See my earlier post on this.

I used to believe in legalising drugs

 

I used to believe in legalising drugs.

For most of my adult life I believed that legalising drugs was the way to control it. At least, I thought, decriminalising drugs was the way. If not legalising then hands off. 

Then I saw what happens when you follow this policy. How it ruined cities, how it ruined lives. Places like San Francisco, LA, Oakland, Seattle. Cities run on “progressive” principles like easy on drugs. They are ruined for everyone, not least the druggies and mentally afflicted themselves. 

Jonathan Choe has been following the issue for years. Brandi Kruse talks to him on a tour of “progressive” Seattle. 

Many of the “homeless” have homes. Have places to stay. But they prefer the street. 

It’s not a lack of shelter crisis. “It’s a drugs and mental health crisis”. 

It’s an addict and mental health problem. That’s only being worsened by “progressive”  policies. Policies that I once supported. Which new mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, still supports. Because it’s “progressive”. Because it’s “empathetic”.

I changed my mind in the legalising drugs issue. Because of facts. Because of experience.

Allowing drug addicts to live on the streets, to shoot up on the sidewalks. To live and die in tents. That’s not compassion. 

Have you ever changed your mind over an issue of substance? Over something really important? That you held close to your heart? That you felt defined you, as a compassionate human?

Socialist countries

Here is a list of countries that have tried some form of socialism (Marxist, Leninist, or self-declared socialist systems) since Marx. Based on a summary from several AIs. None of them prospered when they were socialist. 

The ones in bold are those I’ve visited or lived in. Like China. 

This post follows on from one I did recently on socialism. And how Socialism has never succeeded in any country that tried it.

As for the special case of China… it has only prospered economically and socially to the exact extent that it has allowed capitalism, freed up markets forces, to prevail. They want to call it “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Fine. The fact remains that China prospers with capitalism and impoverishes with socialism.

Anyway, here’s the list: 

•  Soviet Union (USSR/Russia and former republics)

•  China

•  Cuba

•  Vietnam

•  North Korea (DPRK)

•  Laos

•  East Germany

•  Poland

•  Hungary

•  Czechoslovakia

•  Romania

•  Bulgaria

•  Albania

•  Yugoslavia

•  Mongolia

•  Cambodia (Kampuchea)

•  Ethiopia

•  Angola

•  Mozambique

•  Afghanistan (Democratic Republic)

•  Nicaragua

•  Venezuela

•  Bolivia (under certain periods)

•  Chile (Allende era)

•  Tanzania

•  Somalia

•  South Yemen

•  Benin

•  Congo (various periods)

•  Guinea-Bissau

•  Burkina Faso (briefly)

•  Grenada (briefly)

Spencer Kills

 

Bridget Phetasy is so talented. 

Good coverage of the Independent candidate for Mayor of LA, Spencer Pratt. We cross fingers for him, and not the likes of the present Mayor, Karen Bass, who has helped to turn LA into the dumpster fire that it is. 

Unkind Truths vs Kind Lies

Kind Lie: Boys can become Girls. As in become. Actually become. Unkind Truth: no, they can’t. 

Kind Lie: Islam is a “Religion of Peace”. Unkind Truth: no, it’s not. 

Kind Lie: All illegal immigrants are good and productive. Unkind Truth: no, they’re not.

Kind Lie: all cultures are equal. Unkind Truth: no, they’re not. 

Kind Lies lead to dysfunctional systems. As in dysfunctional cities. As in those run by progressive Democrats, people full of Kind Lies. Look at the mess in: LA, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis. 

All of them went soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on illegal immigration, soft on allowing sleeping g in streets. And we see the outcome. It’s there in front of our faces. LA has the additional stain of its shockingly incompetent handling of last year’s wildfires. Which burned thousands of houses and killed 15 homeowners.

Unkind Truths vs Kind Lies

Kind Lie: Boys can become Girls. As in become. Actually become. Unkind Truth: no, they can’t. Kind Lie: Islam is a “Religion of Peace”. Unkind Truth: no, it’s not. Kind Lie: All illegal immigrants are good and productive. Unkind Truth: no, they’re not.

Why support this barbaric theocracy?

Kavya K asks “ How can anyone claim to care about women while supporting this barbaric theocracy?”

My answer:

• Because the progressive Left hates Trump more than they love women.
• Because they hate Trump more than they love freedom 
• Because they hate Trump more than they’ll defend the west against Islamist encroachment 
• Because they hate Trump more than allowing nuclear weapons to genocidal theocratic tyrants 
• Because they hate Trump more than any effort to crush terrorism in the world 
• Because they hate Trump more than they want to constrain the world’s largest supporter of international terrorism.

In short, Because they hate Trump more than anything. 

“Ifyou support Iran’s regime, you’re not anti-war.  

You’re anti-woman.” Listen to Kavya K expose the massive hypocrisy of those who defend the Iranian regime.

She reveals the brutal truth: women in Iran have zero freedom. They are beaten, arrested, raped, and killed for daring to oppose the regime simply for wanting basic human rights.

This is not “resistance.” This is one of the most misogynistic regimes on Earth. 

How can anyone claim to care about women while supporting this barbaric theocracy? 

Video clip here