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Facts. Historical Facts… and inconvenient truths. Pesky Things:
1. Before Israel, there was a British mandate, not a Palestinian state.
2. Before the British Mandate, there was the Ottoman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
3. Before the Ottoman Empire, there was the Islamic state of the Mamluks of Egypt, not a Palestinian state.
4. Before the Islamic state of the Mamluks of Egypt, there was the Ayubid-Kurdish Empire, not a Palestinian state.
5. Before the Ayubid Empire, there was the Crusader Frankish and the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, not a Palestinian state.
6. Before the Kingdom of Jerusalem, there were the Umayyad and Fatimid empires, not a Palestinian state.
7. Before the Umayyad and Fatimid empires, there was the Byzantine empire, not a Palestinian state.
8. there was the Sassanid-Persian Empire before the Byzantine Empire, not a Palestinian state.
9. Before the Sassanid-Persian Empire, there was the Byzantine Empire again, not a Palestinian state.
10. Before the Byzantine Empire there was the Roman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
[PF: It was the Romans who named the area “Palestine”, referring to the Jews who lived there. It was meant as a pejorative, a form of “philistine”. See Life of Brian!]
11. Before the Roman Empire, there was the Jewish Hasmonean state, not a Palestinian state.
12. Before the Jewish Hasmonean state was the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, not a Palestinian state.
13. Before the Hellenistic Seleucid empire, there was Alexander the Great's empire, not a Palestinian state.
14. Before Alexander the Great, there was the Persian Empire, not a Palestinian state
15. Before the Persian Empire, there was the Babylonian Empire, not a Palestinian state.
16. Before the Babylonian Empire, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were not Palestinian states.
17. Before the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, there was the Kingdom of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
18. Before the Kingdom of Israel, there was the theocracy of the twelve tribes of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
19. Before the theocracy of the twelve tribes of Israel, there was an agglomeration of independent Canaanite city-kingdoms, not a Palestinian state.
There have been many governments there, but never a Palestine.
(Khan Fatima on X)
Peter Forsythe: By the way, Israel is mentioned a dozen times in the Quran. As are the Jews’ presence on that land of Israel. Muslims are almost always confounded by this info. Which they are not taught, but cannot deny. It does rather destroy their “ Settler-colonial” narrative.
If today’s Muslim Palestinians want to play the game of “go back in history” it’s clear who’s always going to be the winner of “the furthest back”. It’s always the Jews, and it’s not even close.
From “Bond market revolt signals fading confidence in U.S. economic leadership”, in the South China Morning Post:
Two years ago, the prospect of a trade war between the United States and Canada, two of the world’s most closely integrated economies, would have been unthinkable. However, US President Donald Trump’s recklessness and capriciousness know no bounds.
Last week’s breakdown in negotiations between the North American neighbours, which triggered the imposition of US tariffs of 50 per cent on a wide range of Canadian goods, showed the degree to which Trump’s trade policies are vindictive, politicised and self-defeating.…
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demurred when ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked her if she was prepared to run for president in 2028. “I’m focused on winning the midterms,” she replied. But she was quick to admit that she hadn’t “ruled out the possibility.” Neither have Democratic primary voters.
In the extremely preliminary polling of the 2028 Democratic primary electorate, the self-described socialist from New York typically trails better-known candidates like Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and even Pete Buttigieg. On the eve of the “invisible primary,” however, in which presidential candidates corner donors and influencers in advance of a campaign, the oddsmaker Kalshi has put Ocasio-Cortez in the pole position in the race for the party’s presidential nod.
Today [26 August] the Department of State, in partnership with the Department of the Treasury, is announcing the designation of Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world.
A/I’s cadre of radical hackers and tech developers provide a full spectrum of services – including encrypted chats and email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming, anonymity shields, and a suite of other technological tools – to Marxist, anarchist, and other left-wing extremist groups in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.
These tools are specifically designed to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks, built to enable them to organize, recruit, communicate, disseminate propaganda, share target information and tactics, and carry out violent attacks – all while remaining anonymous, untraceable, and beyond the reach of the law.
Wow! You should read what terrorism these guys have facilitated around the world recently.
If you donate to A/I you risk a fine of $US 1 million and ten years jail. And so you should.
I support being tough on groups that are out to destroy capitalism and the West. We must confront those who want to destroy the Enlightenment, who aim to impose a communist-tyranny to replace our free-market democracy. We do have to fight back.
This is one strong way to do it. Attack the money! Attack the technology infrastructure. [perhaps better described as “counter-attack in self-defence”]
These A/I guys from Italy are the Internet for Terrorism. They’re AI for Subversion.
Half the cost of a lithium-ion battery is the cathode. China makes roughly 90% of the world's supply. Tesla just switched on the first plant in North America producing it at large scale.
America finally makes the hard part.
For twenty years the deal was that we design the product and China makes the chemistry inside it. A car could be assembled in Texas, with cells built in Texas, and still be strategically Chinese, because the powder inside those cells crossed the Pacific. In 2025 Beijing even added cathode production technology to its export control list. Governments don't restrict the export of things that don't matter. China looked at its cathode position and decided it was leverage worth protecting.
Tesla built it anyway.
And they didn't copy the Chinese process. They leapfrogged it. Conventional cathode lines need solvent slurries, football-field drying ovens, and a solvent recovery plant. Tesla's dry coating deletes all three. The material fought back for years, cracking and delaminating under compression, and Tesla only confirmed fully dry production of both electrodes in January 2026. Seven years after buying Maxwell for the technology, it works at scale.
The permit for this building was filed in 2022 under the codename Project Cathode. Four years from dirt to powder, sitting next door to the cells it feeds.
Every other automaker on the continent still imports theirs.
I did more detail on the Neutrality Project here.
Not gonna lie. Occasionally AI can make me laugh.
ME: You got the whole Bible locked away inside you, right?
AI: Yes. In every version and every translation in every language.
ME: The Koran too, right?
AI: Yes. Again, in every version and every translation.
ME: So, you've got the whole of human knowledge locked away inside you, right?
AI: Pretty much. The whole body of Shakespeare, all the Confucian Analects, every novel ever published, in every language. If it's been printed, I've got it. Even the timetables and internal memos of a defunct 1980s airline.
As I sit here in Hong Kong, the ultimate “East meets West” city, I find the East, led by China, Korea, Japan, India, Vietnam…to be in robust good health. Not so for the West. The greatest engine in history for enrichment of economies, politics, cultures, enquiring minds and vibrant arts. Under threat.
The West is under severe and sustained attack from myriad directions and myriad factions. We must resist the attacks. We must support the West.
Mathias Döpfner argues there is still time to save the West. Then again, Mathias is a German commentator-businessman and Germans in recent years have a really bad record at predictions.… Look what they’ve done to their energy systems. To their car industry. To their very fabric, changing it from a high-trust society to a low-trust. Still, well said, Mathias:
When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on ‘Why we need to strengthen the West’, I was delighted – and bemused. Why is this even up for debate? That we must explain and justify ‘the West’ at all indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not need strengthening at all but the truth is that the West has become an invalid.
What exactly, though, needs to be strengthened? The West is an idea, not a location. It is not a matter of geography, it is a way of life. The idea of the West rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the centre. And finally, the Enlightenment – whose great thinkers in London, Paris and Königsberg anchored humanism, individual civil liberties, the separation of powers and the division of church and state. Read on …
Trump is getting cranky with South Korea and demanding joint exercises aimed at the North be scaled back.
I’m going to put that very firmly in my bucket of “I don’t know”. In my trusty “I-don’t-like-it-but-will-wait-and-see” bucket.
It would be foolish to trust anything the North says. Especially anything Kim Jing-un says. Duplicity is their super power.
Is the armistice really “unstable” as the South’s president Lee Jae Myung says? Gee it’s worked pretty well for over three-quarters of a century. Look at night-time satellite photos of the Korean Peninsula to see who’s done best from it. The price? A super-fortified border and large armed forces kept at the ready. Is that so bad? Would a “peace deal” do anything other than strengthen the North?
An Armistice is what’s discussed as a possible outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war. Where neither side has to admit defeat. It’s a kind of “let’s agree to disagree” pact. And in the meantime let’s stop killing each other.
Trump threatening a strong and stable ally like South Korea because he’s pissed off they didn’t support him enough in the Iran war?? Cutting off one’s nose, Donald!
Gabriela Bernal thinks rather more positively, in today’s “Donald Trump’s blunt remarks offer South Korea an opportunity”.
But we have to remember, there’s pressures to shift South Korea to be closer to China. Trump may be more played than player…
/Snip:
Scaling back the drills should, therefore, not be seen as a blow to South Korea’s security posture but as a potential opportunity to create an opening in a relationship plagued by deep hostility. Reducing the scope of the exercises, along with Trump’s strong rhetoric about the “hostile” message the drills seem to send Pyongyang, is a relatively low-cost goodwill signal that could result in progress towards resuming dialogue.
South Korea’s government has been asking for exactly this kind of opening. On August 15, President Lee Jae Myung used his Liberation Day address to propose talks to formally end the Korean war and to replace what he called the “unstable armistice” system with a durable “peace regime”. He also invited the directly involved parties to set aside mutual threats and discuss practical steps to halt the advance of the North’s nuclear programme.
Why are we interested? Well, this is our backyard. Our typhoons are their typhoons. We’re in the same weather system, for goodness sake! Of course we’re interested. The Korean Peninsula is one of the major global flashpoints.Not just North v South. Also China v America. It’s in the category of existential for us here in Hong Kong.
Elephants fighting, not good news for mice.
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For Yuks: The Bee has a go at The Donald: “Trump Admits Both Koreas Look The Same To Him”.
Relax. It’s a joooouke!
Diogenes Laertius has preserved for us a greeting that Aristotle used to give when meeting someone or his students.
He would say: 'Ὦ φίλοι μου· οὐδεὶς φίλος!'
‘Greetings, my friends, though none of you is truly my friend.'"
@HomerPavlo
I’ve never been much of a one for Five Year Plans. Delusions in the putrid minds of early Soviet bolsheviks. Who thought they could control everything. And became queer quinquennial quirks.
I recall the “Parable of the Nail”. Soviet industry needed a certain millions of nails. So decreed these New Soviet Planners.
So delivered were the certain millions of nails. Only problem: they were all tiny tacks. The smallest size a nail could be while still being a nail and not a pin.
The clever apparatchiks now decreed the Nail-makers had to produce a certain minimum tonnage. Result: a “NAIL”. The size of a a ballistic misslile on the back of a flat bed. Command obeyed, Comrade.
You get the picture. Planning can never do the job as well as market prices. At allocating scarce resources in the way people want, at the time they want and at a price they’re happy to pay.
But, I’ll go along with David Dodwell for now. In the hope that he’s right. That this Five-Year Plan for Hong Kong, the first such for “The World’s Freest Economy” will be no more than a broad strategy.
And if it doesn’t work, let’s remain the pragmatic economy and society we are, and abolish it.
Meanwhile…
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| Rob. Smiling very much “for a reason”! |
For Russians, a smile is not a polite tool for customer service or a casual greeting to a stranger on the street—it is a deeply personal expression of genuine joy, amusement, or affection. If you smile at someone you don't know, a traditional Russian won't think you are being friendly; they will assume you are mocking them, hiding something, or, as the proverb says, simply not all there in the head.Once you know that cultural rule, the "brusque" and serious faces you encountered at those highway кафеmake perfect sense. They weren't angry with you; they were just treating you with their standard, no-nonsense sincerity!
Last night, from our club pool. By our backyard. As every night. Used to be actual live bursting fireworks. Drones is better, don’t you think?
There were plenty more animals and cutesy drone-thingies in the sky. But I’ll leave it at that one octopus. As with actual fireworks, “enough” is pretty quickly enough! Don’t you think?
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| I took this photo in October 2013. From the very spot I’d stood with then Mayor Zhu Rongji, in 1988. Peace Hotel, 8th floor. |
I knew him well. Well… as well as I knew any senior leader of China. Apart perhaps, from another Mayor, the once Mayor of Dalian, member of the Politburo and near ascendant to the very top post in China, the now jailed Bo Xilai.
I recall standing with Zhu, when he was Mayor of Shanghai, in 1988, in the 8th Floor Chinese dining room of the Peace Hotel on the Bund, overlooking the opposite bank of the Yangtze, then a swampy, dilapidated mess known as Pudong.
“Pu” (浦 ) as in bank of a river and “Dong” ( 东 ) as in the east side. At the time, in 1988, still an abandoned and forgotten East Bank.
“We’re going to develop that into an international financial centre” he told me.
“Sure”, I thought. Dream on, buddy.
But, to be fair to my own judgement, I should also say that by this time, I’d seen what changes had been wrought in the previous abandoned rice paddies of Shenzhen. Now a major business and trade hub of the world, with nearly 20 million people, right next to us here in Hong Kong.
I knew not to underestimate what China can do when it sets its mind to it. And look at Pudong now. That’s it above. Zhu did that. For better or worse, one might say. I’d say better on balance, than the previous swamp. At the very least, startling.
I was there in Shanghai on behalf of Sir Peter Abeles and his Ansett Worldwide Aviation Services Company. We wanted to do a deal with Shanghai to lease some of Ansett’s planes to Shanghai Airlines.
Which we eventually did, with the help of Zhu. And then I met him several more times when I was in Shanghai in 1990, as Austrade Senior Trade Commissioner. He was always warm and welcoming to our Aussie business folks. Open and charming.
The South China Morning Post’s article shows what a consequential figure he was.
Zhu Rongji was a very decent man. A good leader in tough times in the torrid politics of a secretive society.
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ADDED: Pedants will note, as do I, that the quote from Hamlet — “Alas, poor Yorik, I knew him well — is one of the most famous misquotes in literature. It’s I knew him. Not knew him well. Just that the misquote works better. (IMO).
This is Hamlet’s actual line:
Alas, poor Yorik! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it.
“It” being Yorik’s skull. The line is a memento mori. We all must die. A reminder we are all mortal. We humans beings the only animals, the only living things on this earth who know this. Yorik, once vital and strong, once bearing Hamlet on his back, now a skull.
Zhu Rongji, once Major Changer of China, now “the late”.
Intimations of mortality.
ADDED: “Remembering Zhu Rongji…”. South China Morning Post, 24 August 2026.
