@TONYxTWO

TRUMP JUST POSTED THIS!!!

“We need help to get word out about FEMA, we spoke with Ivanka and handed out starlinks with her yesterday but FEMA then showed up and started blocking us”

Meme

If anyone dared deface this poxy stone in Martin Place, expect to be put in the clink.
Has anyone ever been arrested over the cutting down of the James Cook statue in Melbourne? Correct me if I am wrong but I can’t recall any apprehending.

David Penberthy writes:

As sick and as tasteless as it might be, the attempted scheduling of anti-Israel protests in Australia on the loaded date of October 7 has done our community a favour.

It provides final and indisputable clarity as to the fact that many of the people protesting are motivated by a genuine and racist hatred of Jews.

What other reason would there be to pick this date?

A recap for the profoundly forgetful.

What happened on October 7 last year was not some act of resistance against colonisers or some romantic Che Guevara-style attack on a fascist regime.

No-one was setting out to kill soldiers. They weren’t trying to target military bases or infrastructure.

This was a sickeningly successful plot to kill as many civilians as possible, simply because they were Jewish.

The entire focus of the operation was to kill kids at dance festivals and elderly people working on their farms

Little kids were included in the death toll. Many young women who survived were so defiled they probably wish they had perished.

So on what date are we going to hold our local day of solidarity with the people of Palestine?

Umm, I dunno, how’s October 7 sound?

There are a lot of bandwagon jumping halfwits in Australia who consider themselves left-wing and progressive but need an adult to sit them down and tease out their ideological inconsistencies.

The first goes to their assertion that Israel has brought all this on itself by refusing to progress a two-state solution.

Setting aside the long, byzantine history of Israel’s several offers of two-state solutions, a more fundamental contradiction is at play.

The people at the protests might want a two-state solution but the two key organisations at war with Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, do not want a two-state solution. They want a no-state solution. A final solution.

They want Israel and by definition and default its inhabitants wiped off the map.

For inhabitants, read the Jews.

Then there’s the small issue of who is behind Hamas and Hezbollah – Iran.

How can any so-called progressive person in Australia either downplay or rationalise the work of either of these organisations, backed as they are by a demented theocracy that thinks women should keep their mouths shut, their faces covered, and that gay people should be put to death?

There has been much discussion this week about the availability and acceptance of Hezbollah flags at protests on Australian streets this past few days.

Our federal police were slow off the mark to twig to this as an issue, weirdly sitting it out (probably on squeamish PC grounds) until its outrageousness was rightly pointed out by our politicians.

Again, as with the election of October 7 as the protest date, the waving of flags in Melbourne has truly belled the cat as to the agenda of some of those protesting.

Since its inception in the 1980s Hezbollah has pioneered the murder of civilians and the use of suicide bombings as its primary tactical vehicle.

Its charter explicitly states that Israel should not exist and its leaders and clerical supporters have made all sorts of vile and demented claims about the Jews, every trope under the sun, from claims about international banking conspiracies to the creation of the AIDS virus.

If you think you’re progressive holding up a Hezbollah flag, you need to go back to left-winger school and brush up on the tenets of socialism.

We aren’t talking here about some freedom-fighting organisation but a bunch of fanatical and violent lunatics who have rightly been listed internationally by every liberal nation as a terrorist organisation.

As for the flags, rather than asking how people obtained them in Australia, we might have missed a trick here by not getting ASIO and the AFP to hand them out.

The deal could be that in return for sharing your name, address and citizenship status, you could be given a Hezbollah flag on the spot, with a couple of jets sitting, idling at Tullamarine ready to take you back to your ancestral home.

I wrote a few months ago about the tormenting of Labor MP Josh Burns, the only federal Labor MP who has had his office vandalised and graffitied so frequently that he ordered his staff to stay away indefinitely for their own safety.

Burns is the only Labor MP to have attracted this degree of attention.

He has done so despite being a very minor player in the federal government. He’s not in charge of Labor’s foreign policy.

He’s not in cabinet. He’s just a backbencher who dutifully serves his electorate.

The reason Burns has been unable to serve his electorate is because his electoral office was turned into a no-go zone by a bunch of “progressives” angered over the treatment of Palestinians.

The reason Burns was selected for such special treatment?

He’s a Jew.

Burns got picked in the same way that October 7 gets picked as the date for a day of action or a Hezbollah flag gets picked up on the streets of Melbourne in some act of anti-colonial solidarity.

We should stop tiptoeing around the true nature of many of these protesters.

You can understand people being motivated to attend these rallies out of a sense of compassion at civilian deaths.

They need to ask themselves what sort of company they are really keeping.

And as for Australia, we have every right to say that anyone who picks up a Hezbollah flag and waves it on the street in this tolerant, liberal country, is probably living in the wrong place and should piss off accordingly.

The first time I have heard of Josh Burns. I wonder what his thoughts are on the Wong Chap literally shitting on his head with her absurdities flowing freely from her cakehole.
Wonder if the arsehole Greens will be in attendance. If so, piss them off too.

Douglas Murray at his brilliant best…

Israel was right to ignore the West

Douglas Murray, The Spectator, 5 October 2024

There are sources in the Jewish tradition that warn against exultation at the downfall of one’s enemies. But I am not Jewish, and so I have exulted greatly these past two weeks. If you follow most of the British media, you may well think that the past year involves the following events: Israel attacked Hamas, Israel invaded Lebanon, Israel bombed Yemen. Oh and someone left a bomb in a room in Tehran that killed the peaceful Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Kamala Harris warned that the IDF shouldn’t go into Rafah. As she wisely said: ‘I’ve studied the maps’

Of course all this is an absolute inversion of the truth. Hamas invaded Israel, so Israel attacked Hamas. Hezbollah has spent the past year sending thousands of rockets into Israel, so Israel has responded by destroying Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen – now so beloved of demonstrators in the UK – sent missiles and drones hundreds of miles to attack Israel, so Israel bombed the Houthis’ arms stores in Yemen. And Hamas leader Haniyeh, who was born under Egyptian rule and died in Tehran, never brought the Palestinian people anything but misery.

On 7 October last year Israel was surprised by a brigade-sized invasion of terrorists into its territory. These terrorists raped, murdered and burned their way as far inside Israel as they could get. How this intelligence and military failure was possible is something that Israelis still have to work out. But the first answer is because they face a fanatical, ideological opponent which wants to destroy them. Hezbollah joined in the action on 8 October. All these attacks were funded and orchestrated by the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which as I write this is sending hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel from Iran – strikes that have so far proved a failure.

Hamas still holds a hundred Israelis hostage inside Gaza, but the Israeli government has managed to bring half the hostages home already. For many people in the first days of the war, it seemed impossible that even one hostage would be able to come back to their families alive. So this is no mean feat in itself. Aside from saving the hostages, the other most important thing for Israel has been to strike and destroy the proxy armies of Iran who wish to make the whole of Israel unlivable for Jews.

All this time the governments in Britain and America have given the Israelis advice which mercifully they did not listen to. Earlier this year, Kamala Harris warned that the IDF shouldn’t go into Hamas’s Gaza stronghold in Rafah. As she wisely said: ‘I’ve studied the maps.’ Fortunately the Israelis did not listen to Kamala’s beginners’ guide to Rafah. They went into the Hamas stronghold, continued to search for the hostages, continued to kill Hamas’s leadership and continued to destroy the rocket and other ammunition stores that Hamas has built up for 18 years.

Next came the complete destruction of Hezbollah, which has the blood of hundreds of Americans and other nationals on its hands, as well as that of Israelis. Not to mention the fact that this foreign army of Iran has immiserated Lebanon for 40 years. The Christians of that country have dwindled to a minority as these Shiite fundamentalists have taken a once thriving country and turned it into yet another ayatollah-dominated hellhole.

Then, in a series of attacks which historians are already studying, everything went kaboom for Hezbollah. First thousands of its operatives were targeted all over Lebanon and Syria. Having decided that phones were not a safe means of communication, the terrorists had recently reverted to pagers, but someone managed to get into the supply chain, put a small amount of explosive in every Hezbollah device and then blew the balls off the people who were hoping to destroy their neighbours. Then Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies also suddenly detonated. Much of Hezbollah’s leadership – including those involved in the killing of 241 American marines in their barracks in Beirut in 1983 – met up in person to discuss all this, during which they too were killed in a strike.

The British and American governments among others had told the Israelis that there should be no escalation. But fortunately they weren’t listened to. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had gone to New York to address the various despots and kleptocrats on First Avenue; so the ultimate leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, thought that this would be a safe moment to get together with the few remaining members of his organisation. Before going on stage in New York and observing the traditional walkout of ‘diplomats’, Netanyahu ordered the final strike. While he was up there, Hassan Nasrallah went to meet his maker.

By this point, there is nobody left in Hezbollah. They’re all gone. All of the leadership, every one of their commanders, while their lower-level operatives are trying to get their testicles reattached in the hospitals of Beirut. It’ll be wall-to-wall wreath-laying for the Hamas and Hezbollah fanboys.

But there it is. The wisdom of the international community is that ceasefires are always desirable, that negotiated settlements are always to be desired, and that violence is never the answer. As so often, these wise international voices have no idea what they are talking about.

Israel’s enemies have spent the past year trying to destroy it, as they have so many times before. But it is they who have gone to the dust, with the regime in Tehran the only thing that is, for the time being, still standing. Absent that terror regime, and not just Israel but the whole of the Middle East has a bright future. Sometimes you need war to make peace. Sometimes there is a price to pay for trying to finish the work of Adolf Hitler. Who knew?

Oct 7th protests brought to you by the ghost of Malcolm Fraser.

There’s plenty of blame to apportion.

Howard gazetted quite a few Muslim majority countries as sources for mass immigration in 2001.

Like Fraser, he wouldn’t accept advice that it was unwise.

And the old fool still maintains he has no regrets about his premiership.

Remember that if he pops up to play elder statesman in the current malaise.

La Trioli has a piece in the Daily Telegraph:

I have long thought about writing a cookbook, a guide to and celebration of the side dishes, the extras – the sauces, the stuffings, the dressings, the salads and vegetables – that are the most memorable part of a meal for me.

My eyes always go to those side dishes: a little bowl of gently charred and slightly soured eggplant, or a dreamy polenta, or a perfectly dressed salad of bitter and soft leaves. They make me happiest of all.

I’m quite fond of a roast turkey (a critically underrated addition to your general entertaining repertoire, by the way, mostly relegated to overburdened tables on 40-degree Christmas days), but what I’m really after is the stuffing: that soft and savoury side dish of herbs, good bread, nuts and fruit.

The main dish can go on a bit much, to be honest (who needs all of that fish?), but the fine puddle of meunière – butter and lemon and wine – that the fillet is sitting in? I’ll take a jug of it.

I know you know what I mean: I see you, dragging a finger through that lovely sauce, looking around urgently for a bit more bread to soak up the dressing. Actually – forget it: just hand me that spoon, will you?

The book was a cute idea. I could see the elegant colour pages, the best recipes. Stories from my years of reading and re-reading the hundreds of cookbooks I have collected over decades. Memories from the places I’ve been lucky enough to travel to, the wonderful decades of Australian food culture I’ve been witness to. Small dishes, clever sauces from around the world. It would be a book to celebrate the bit-players at your table: no main-character energy allowed.

Then the world fell in, and all of a sudden, the idea of a life-saving side serving, an extra dollop of sauce, just that little spoonful of joy, seemed to be a much more powerful, much more deeply experienced thing.

The last few years have made even more sense of this side-dish instinct.

Sometimes the main course of your life can be a hard-going and unappetising thing: sometimes it can be absolute rubbish.

Your working life, your family, global catastrophes, personal tragedies both ordinary and unexpected – all of it. You can have so little control over any of it, and the only choices you do seem to have are often rather small ones: minor, seemingly insubstantial decisions that may add a bit of pleasure to a dense and demanding situation.

Just enough joy to get you across the line.

These moments of grace come in unassuming ways. Sitting outside, hands curled around a cup of coffee made just the way you like it, the sun full and dazzling on your face. That first slice of warm cake, stolen and eaten standing up in the kitchen as you prepare a surprise afternoon tea for your otherwise grumpy teenage kids.

An unexpected phone call from an old friend, not heard from in years and yet you are straight back into conversation, right where you left off. The perfect song on the radio just as you hit the open road, big sky country unfolding in front of you. A blackbird’s call, clear and hopeful before the sun gets up.

Life and recent years have made me a seeker of these moments of joy, moments of grace, and these bits on the side have come to mean so much more. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our way of eating has moved in this direction too. The entree-main-dessert formulation now seems a little old, a little heavy: instead, we have evolved to prefer a collection of shared small plates – a food mosaic of all the little delights that make up a great table.

Memory and food are powerfully connected for me: places I have eaten in and the dishes I have chanced upon form the language that tells the story I want to remember.

The significant circumstance attached to that memory – experienced as a younger person, or a person in love, or a person nursing a broken heart – becomes a hero dish in itself. A madeleine of many memories.

Is that why the power of food memory is so strong? That unexpected experience, perhaps many years ago now, that you’ve tried to hunt down and replicate so many times, mostly without success? Local prawns eaten out of the back of the car on a remote Queensland beach that have never tasted the same since; the perfumed hit of a real summer strawberry; your first taste of a true Italian linguine vongole in a tiny trattoria you’ll never find again.

The persistence of memory and of the food histories we cherish and chase form the heart of this book.

The magical processes of cooking have become a kind of life guide for me too: the unmixable components that somehow come together, the elements that hold and those that separate; the things that need heat, pressure, even charring to become what they need to be; the salt that amplifies, the salt that ruins; the sour that makes sense of the sweet. It’s an inexhaustible metaphor, and I would resist it but for the blunt force of its truth. All the world is in the kitchen, its processes, failures and transformations, and it is the laboratory of the one thing that defines my understanding of what I’m here to do, and what matters to me most: that it’s all about connection.

The years I have spent cooking and preparing food for the people I love, a craft that started for me as an eight-year-old, represent the work of winding and weaving the connections that stabilise and fulfil me.

In the rest of my life, I have always considered my task to be that of a conduit: connecting people to each other’s experiences, to ideas and to complexities, rendering them understandable and meaningful.

My many years working on television and radio programs has wired that notion of connection even more powerfully: presenting shows like ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on both Sydney and Melbourne radio meant leading but also becoming part of a real-time community that lives to respond, wakes to connect, and does so at the always vulnerable and affecting hours of the early morning.

My vocation to hinge conversations continues to be deeply important for me, and it is all of a piece with the act of creation and connection that is a life of cooking.

This is a book of life experiences, travels, memories and investigations into the sweet and the sour, the bitter and the sharp, of a life of small chosen moments of joy: the important moments in my life, in all our lives, that make sense of what we find ourselves doing, and that are sometimes the only things that make life possible at all.

This idea is one that I share with the Japanese concept of ikigai – your purpose in living. Ikigai’s fundamental concept is understanding that a happy life isn’t a long-term project that one day will be achieved and complete, but is really an accumulation of small daily experiences, small joys that are taken where they can be found, and that add up to become the life you have chosen.

Daily life, even the mundane moments, can contain the small joys that you need to live that happy life. I’ve been so fortunate that many people, experiences and times in my life have taught me that too. I’d like to share them with you here

To paraphrase the Mayor of Hiroshima, what the phuck was that?