You might say most Muslims live peaceably. That is true but not to the point. It is a mistake to think that a few can wreak havoc for very long without a groundswell of support. The head dies without the body. Hitler and his henchmen did not attain and survive in power without a strong mass of popular support. Have look at those old newsreels and the adoring crowds.
We have demographic problem. Hate speech laws will damage the fabric of our society without solving it. What then to do? Two things in my view. First, stop all further Muslim immigration. That’s not racist. Religion has nothing to do with race. Religion is a free choice. Second, continue to embrace the existing Muslim population as valued citizens of Australia. But, at the same time, call out without timidity, and ridicule unmercifully, un-Australian behaviour. Some of those Islamic preachers provide rich material for comedians. Monty Python would have field day. Think of Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler.
Second, continue to embrace the existing Muslim population as valued citizens of Australia.
The evidence to hand is that any Muslim isn’t a valued member of Australian society. They are capable of great acts of violence against every nation they infest, and are incapable of change. Send them away.
The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas announced on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) has implications nearly as momentous as the October 7, 2023, massacre that precipitated it.
The deal comes after 15 months of protracted indecision by the government of Israel, during which Jerusalem followed two contradictory policies towards Hamas: destroy the organisation; make a deal with it.
The first policy, victory over Hamas, clearly appealed more to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By my informal count, he mentioned “victory” 216 times in 76 discreet statements, from the immediate aftermath of October 7 to lighting the Hanukkah candles three weeks ago.
At times, as in a statement on French television, his sentences amounted to a barrage of victory talk: “Our victory is your victory,” he said. “Our victory is the victory of Israel against anti-Semitism. It is the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism. It is the victory of France.”
Nor did Netanyahu seek just plain victory. He spoke variously of “absolute victory”, “clear victory”, “complete victory”, “decisive victory”, “full victory” and “total victory”. Of these formulations, “total victory” led the pack, mentioned 81 times and showcased via a “Total Victory” baseball cap during a visit with former president Donald Trump.
Internal Israeli debates confirmed Netanyahu’s preference for victory. For example, Netanyahu banged on the table and told off his national security team, according to Israel’s Channel 12: “You are weak. You don’t know how to run a tough negotiation.” An informed source concluded: “He has given up on the hostages.”
It is pretty lengthy but I can post the rest of it if anyone is interested.
More than a few years ago I regularly read his blog about his take on the middle east.
Last edited 25 days ago by Beertruk
Black Ball
January 19, 2025 8:30 am
Rabz I’m sorry but I have to get Crash Craddock’s report on some Cricket Australia phuckwittery:
Cricket will be an invisible sport on Australia Day for the first time in 31 years but the fans want it back next year.
And Cricket Australia is set to deliver their wish following sensitive discussions with its Indigenous advisory group.
Because Australia Day (January 26) falls next Sunday, the same day as the Australian Open men’s tennis final, Cricket Australia has elected to move the Big Bash final to the public holiday Monday, the next day, to maximise its viewing audience.
A survey of 3000 fans conducted by this masthead, about 95 per cent of readers want cricket played on Australia Day.
CA confirmed when recently releasing their latest Reconciliation Action Plan, they are planning to “respectfully deliver’’ Australia Day games in the future.
“We will play international or Big Bash matches on January 26 depending on the schedule each season,” CA said in a statement.
“Cricket Australia will continue to collaborate with stakeholders and our advisory group to ensure all matches are delivered respectfully.”
Playing cricket on Australia Day has become a sensitive issue with Australian women’s star and Muruwari woman Ashleigh Gardner criticising Australia last year for scheduling a T20 match against Pakistan on Australia Day.
The second Australian Indigenous woman to play Tests, Gardner said the arrival of the first fleet in Australia in 1788 was a “day of hurt’’ for Indigenous Australians and playing on the anniversary of that day did not sit well with her.
The issue triggered an emotion national debate last year when January 26 fell during the Australian men’s teams final Test of the summer against the West Indies at the Gabba.
Cricket Australia has not mentioned the words Australia Day in its marketing or promotions for cricket events since 2021 and the initial plan was for the Gabba ground announcer not to mention Australia Day when he welcomed the public before play at the Gabba.
A public backlash resulted in that decision being overturned.
Australia captain Pat Cummins said before the Test he felt Australia should choose a “more appropriate date’’ to celebrate Australia Day than January 26.
Australia is committed to increasing its Indigenous participation in cricket and is not proud of the statistic that fast bowler Jason Gillespie and Scott Boland remain Australia’s only two Indigenous male cricketers to play for Australia in Tests.
When Gillespie became Australia’s Indigenous Test cricketer that fact was not even acknowledged when he made his Test debut.
Patrick Cummins is a moron. As is Ash Gardiner.
The only stakeholders you should be concerned with you dunderheads is the paying public, of which there would be many a black fella among them.
And sensitive discussions? What the hell does that entail? Just another captive to woke dickheads.
The second Australian Indigenous woman to play Tests, Gardner said the arrival of the first fleet in Australia in 1788 was a “day of hurt’’ for Indigenous Australians and playing on the anniversary of that day did not sit well with her.
Keep picking at the scabs, the wounds will never heal.
She entirely lacks self awareness. If it wasn’t for the arrival of the first fleet she wouldn’t be playing cricket and receiving the money and recognition she does. She would most likely be being bashed and abused by her male superiors.
Gillespie didnt even know he had any aboriginal ancestors when selected, neither did Boland.
Louis Litt
January 19, 2025 8:32 am
Morning blackball
Bournemouth, what a result.
Brentford – almost.
Leicster in real trouble under the Rudd.
its great seeing where Tottenham and the two Manchester sides are.
Championship no real surprises. Sheffield Utd under Wilder doing great with Burley and Sunderland drawing.
Blackburns run has stopped. Going through a tough patch after steering themselves into the play off.
I am wondering with players being offered big money to play in the Saudi league, China , whether more English players will comprise of the teams.
“He said, ‘They told me they’d let me plead out something small, and I’ll do just a couple of years in a camp, if I can give them something on Trump to get him impeached.’
“He says, but the government told me I don’t have to prove what I say about Trump, as long as Trump’s people can’t disprove it,” Tartaglione said — adding that Epstein considered “making stuff up” to save his skin. Tartaglione never said what Epstein ultimately planned to do.
Overnight, whilst we slept, there was yet another ‘pro-Palestine’ Nazi march in London, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a motley group of left, far-left and Islamist Nazi scum. It’s interesting isn’t it that this march went ahead despite the cease fire agreement. Since October 7 2023 these Nazi marches have occurred almost weekly and the route they’ve been allowed to walk has been smack bang right past a synagogue, London’s Central Synagogue to be precise.
Like here, Jews now avoid parts of inner London and they avoid Central Synagogue. But this time London Plod insisted that the Nazi marchers slightly change their route so the Jews could be left in peace.
Fat chance. Fifteen months of soft policing has empowered and enabled Nazis and Nazism on the streets of the UK and Australia. So, of course the Nazi PSC didn’t like the change of route, nor were they willing to accept the police directive to alter the route slightly.
From the Jewish Chronicle two days ago…
After over a year of the Met taking a soft policing approach to the marches, no matter how frightening the presence of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of fanatical anti-Israel protesters has been for many Jews, it has finally demanded that the next march leaves Jews alone. The PSC have been ordered to change the assembly point so that congregants attending Central Synagogue are free from intimidation by protesters travelling to the march. Over the past year, the synagogue has had to shorten and cancel services. Many congregants have simply stayed away as they are too intimidated to run the gauntlet of the protesters.
The route change ordered by the police is a minor tweak that in no way restricts the protesters from marching. It simply seeks to minimise the impact on Jews going about their business on Shabbat. But the organisers have said that they will ignore the police’s demand. Let us be clear what this means: the PSC considers that the need for them to be able to intimidate Jews is more important than obeying the law.
Like here, these ‘marches’ have never been about ‘Palestine’ or ‘Israel’. They are about Jews, specifically about intimidating and threatening Jews.
The scenes overnight from London are not pretty, the leftist and Muslim Nazi scum tried to push their way through the police lines so that they could walk past the synagogue to intimidate and threaten Jews.
Sports news (sort of)
I haven’t watched a second of time of her playing, but I’m disappointed that Danielle Collins is not progressing in the tennis. Her personal philosophy is to be admired, encapsulated in her statement “Good luck getting under the skin of someone who doesn’t give a …” . Her taking it to the crowd reveals a moral courage to be admired in these times.
(I rather hope that that the Australian “slam” disappears, or is at least moved out of Melbourne.)
As for the BBL, how can it be taken seriously as a sporting fixture when it’s good players not only move around the teams from one season to another, but just prior to the finals go and play in another competition?
Sancho Panzer
January 19, 2025 9:04 am
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
January 19, 2025 12:49 am
Off to bed now. Slept in till 2pm so not too late for us yet.
Just added a few more points about Indian hygiene experience
I like to travel but locally only, due to my phobia about air travel.
Gong on a cruise ship??? Why on earth would you go on a crowded vessel you can’t escape from? Shopping at a mall is bad enough.
But the point I’m trying to get to is, why India? We all know the conditions there, I’d rather watch the magnificent buildings on U-tube and avoid the humdrum and danger of infections, upset tummy etc. of everyday Indian life.
But each to his/her own.
Glad you did it but, and we can read about it. Thanks.
Many members of Congress bought META stock as they were voting to ban TikTok, they’re getting rich while eliminating their donors competition
Congressman Michael McCaul who wrote The TikTok Ban Bill invested $1.15 Million into META after writing the bill
– On March 3rd, he authored the TikTok Ban Bill – On March 22nd, he invested $150,000 in META – On the 26th, he invested another $150,000 – On the 28th, he invested another $150,000
So about three weeks after writing the TikTok Ban Bill, this man invested $450,000 in TikTok’s competitor.
Oh, and then what did he do once he saw his TikTok ban was gonna be included with all the Ukraine funding:
– Well, on April 1st, he invested $350,000 more in META, followed by the fifth where he invested that again.
Then about a week later, of course, he voted yes on the bill he wrote.
So within the span of 40 days, this dude wrote the TikTok ban bill, proceeded to invest $450,000 in the competitor, and then invested another $700,000, taking his total investment and META at a $1.15 million.
And then he voted yes. Now, obviously the word most people are using here is suspicious, but the word we should be using is criminal.
This man wrote the f***** bill to ban TikTok, proceeded to invest more than a million dollars in its competitor, whose stock will skyrocket if TikTok actually gets banned, and then voted on the bill to ban it.
Are you paying attention yet?” #tiktokban It’s all about censorship.
GreyRanga
January 19, 2025 9:08 am
My wife saw the Iranian Princess (Rita) on sky last night. Lefties losing it. Hasn’t laughed so much since the last time I did something stupid. Her comment was, “are these people for real”?
Tom
January 19, 2025 9:23 am
Lefty Tom Connell leads the daytime Sky contingent who scored a trip to America to cover the protests against Trump’s inauguration on Monday. Of course, Trump is a “climate denier” who has no respect for the lefty climate religion, given free rein by Connell this morning in his Never Trump protest roundup from Washington DC.
However, climate is now only the No.2 lefty religion behind Jew hatred, which is being covered devoutly by Sky’s UK affiliate, which has sent its zombies to Israel to campaign against Bibi Netanyahu’s ceasefire deal with the Devil.
Sky Australia has also sent its laziest sod Chris Kenny, who has never broken a story on his 5pm weekday show, to Washington to do the usual talking points from the inauguration.
Meanwhile, Sky Outsiders is back on the air today. The only Sky laggard still on holidays is political editor Andrew Clennell, whose Sunday Agenda program went on vacation in December and still hasn’t returned.
The suggestion we can power modern economies at scale on renewable energy is farcical. This is why Australia is the only country pretending that it can do it.
That’s his latest, but he’s been regularly writing about idiot renewables policies.
Daytime Sky doesn’t have to be just another lefty MSM clique, but it is.
We don’t need more of that. There’s plenty of it in the media already.
Having lefty opinions all day “as part of our broad church mix” is foolish.
… and school lessons and homework would be done via computer linked holograms.
And all in place 10 years ago.
Must be true, Kevin’s ads told us.
Combined with Julia’s triple priced sheds for the full Building The Education Revolution ™ effect, no wonder Australian kids lead the world in academic achievement.
Dr Faustus
January 19, 2025 10:14 am
Poll: Nearly Half of Federal Employees Say They Plan to Resist Trump’s Incoming Administration
Add in an isolated touch of rough stuff and – Bingo – you’ve got the standard US DOJ definition of ‘insurrection’.
On returning home Friday to a bleak Sydney storm I sat outside on our verandah in a break in the weather savouring the non-Delhi air and the Currawongs saw me. She’s home! Down they came, and two of the cutest baby Kookas too. I sliced some meat off some frozen stuff and soon had them a little feast. They were all wet, cold and hungry. I then watched them circling around the gully and suddenly sensed Attapuss there beside me in his fave watching spot. His little spirit lives in this gully, keeping an eye on things.
Last nite one young Currawong arrived for some food very late, almost dark, and put on a noisy performance because I was a bit tardy getting it.
Don’t you know I have to be in that tree over there before dark, she lectures me as she hops around as I set the meat out for her.
bons
January 19, 2025 10:16 am
It is comforting to see life returning to normal.
The ‘pussy hats’ are back in the Mall.
The pathetic dregs of 2017 will all catch pneumonia before being hit by the Trump train. Enjoy losers.
Roger
January 19, 2025 10:17 am
‘…today as in the past, each of us, more or less, would like to profit from the labor of others. One does not dare to proclaim this feeling publicly, one conceals it from oneself, and then what does one do? One imagines an intermediary; one addresses the state, and each class proceeds in turn to say to it: “You, who can take fairly and honorably, take from the public and share with us.” Alas! The state is only too ready to follow such diabolical advice; for it is composed of cabinet ministers, of bureaucrats, of men, in short, who, like all men, carry in their hearts the desire, and always enthusiastically seize the opportunity, to see their wealth and influence grow. The state understands, then, very quickly the use it can make of the role the public entrusts to it. It will be the arbiter, the master, of all destinies. It will take a great deal; hence, a great deal will remain for itself. It will multiply the number of its agents; it will enlarge the scope of its prerogatives; it will end by acquiring overwhelming proportions.’
Frederic Bastiat, The State, 1848.
Selected Essays on Political Economy (FEE ed.) | Online Library of Liberty
An English translation of some of Bastiat’s most famous pamphlets, written as part of his opposition to the growth of socialism in France in the 1840s. Contains “What is Seen and What is Not Seen”, “The Law”, and “The State”.
Inquiring minds will find a wealth of texts freely available at this site.
Recommended especially for any young and aspiring ‘free thinkers’ in your family (seeking to think themselves free themselves from socialist indoctrination, that is!)
WIP great as usual; the Hegseth memes are especially good but the California lesbian and dikes ones are great too.
Bungonia Bee
January 19, 2025 10:24 am
Hamas is “surviving” because everyone from the garbo and dogcatcher up is a Hamas member or official.
Miltonf
January 19, 2025 10:52 am
Nancy Pelosi has been San Francisco’s representative in the House since 1987 when San Francisco was far less dirty and dangerous than it is now. The fact that she is now 84 years old and in her ten gazillionth term is an indication of San Francisco leftists’ taste for bad governance. San Francisco residents will cheerfully vote for a sinister corruptocrat who affirms the transgender madness over an honest and upright public servant who would set things right in the city, but who refuses to pretend that men can become women.
Alas the Keating FBT was well in place by the time I started work. The NAB cafeteria was possibly my major source of nourishment during my (short lived) Melbournibad share house days.
Bill P
January 19, 2025 11:11 am
On the “UK is farked”, my daughter has just returned from a holiday there.
She was confronted outside Tower Hill station by Mueslis pushing English translations of the Koran onto her. Free copies.
What sort of paper were they printed on?
We should stock up for the next dunny paper shortage.
feelthebern
January 19, 2025 11:23 am
Last year it was hard to watch Chiefs games because the referees were giving them a helping hand all season.
This season, contrary to social media, the refs has been pretty straight down the line and the Chiefs have managed to win more games this year than they did last year.
Then today the refs put their thumb on the scale and do it pretty blatantly in some occasions.
The Texans still had their opportunities that they screwed up.
Still, no matter the sport when the refs decide the outcome it’s a shit spectacle.
The left push victimology: 3rd nations, global boiling and islam. All are destructive but I think islam is the worst.
In Dr. Peter Hammond’s book, “Slavery, Terrorism and Islam, (2009)” he documents the way Muslims slowly develop a presence in various countries and as their population numbers build, become more aggressive and assertive about exercising Sharia law. “Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In its fullest form, it is a complete, total, 100% system of life,” Dr. Hammond notes in his book. “Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components. The religious component is a beard for all of the other components.”
When the Muslim population remains under 2% in a country, they will be seen primarily as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to other citizens.
As the Muslim population reaches 2% to 5%, they begin to recruit from ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, within prisons and street gangs.
“From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population,” Dr. Hammond notes. “For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food” and increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature such food on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply.
“When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions,” Dr. Hammond notes. “In Paris, we are already seeing car-burnings. Any non-Muslim action offends Islam, and results in uprisings and threats, such as in Amsterdam, with opposition to Mohammed cartoons and films about Islam.”
The violence increases when the Muslim population reaches 20%. “After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues,”
“At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare,”
From 60%, persecution of non-believing “infidels” rises significantly, including sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia law as a weapon, and Jizya, a tax placed on infidels,
After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some State-run ethnic cleansing, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out “infidels,” and move toward a 100% Muslim society,
Obviously the categories merge but Hammond has been vindicated in EVERY Western nation which hosts a muzzie population. But make no mistake islam is facilitated by the left in the West. In commie nations the left do not tolerate muzzies.
Knuckle Dragger
January 19, 2025 11:27 am
BB, earlier:
Patrick Cummins is a moron. As is Ash Gardiner
Well, yes.
Unfortunately, a very sizeable chunk of the public at large seem to believe that if one has a particular world-class skill, that person must also be equally skilful in all other fields of endeavour and/or a magnificent human being to boot. Sadly, this is in fact not the case.
This is true across the board, but particularly in sport. A very few examples:
Shane Warne Pat Cummins Wayne Carey Don Bradman Ray Shaw David Warner
Hell, I’m not even sure if Ben Roberts-Smith VC is a decent bloke – as proficient as he was in his former career.
The reverse is also true. People brilliant in one particular area tend to think ‘I am awesome at X, therefore I am awesome at everything’. This is why celebrities, and actors in particular feel compelled to offer their opinions on geopolitics, science, geology and medicine.
Warnie was just a simple bogan who enjoyed life to the full and got rewarded handsomely for an obscure skill. In his favour he never pretended to be anything else or lecture to others. Captain Carbon would do well to follow his lead.
When Wayne Carey was enjoying one of his periods in exile (for beating up a then girlfriend I think) he was in a Port Melbourne restaurant where I was enjoying a post hangover late breakfast hamburger. Think he lived in the quite upmarket HMAS building or something.
He should build it in his garage where he keeps all his other government documents.
Diogenes
January 19, 2025 11:48 am
I stumbled across “History Undone with James Hanson” on YouTube. The schtick is they have a regular historian, plus a specialist guest. They have 2 types of episodes , one busting myths , the other examines a historical event( a battle or campaign) , telling us what actually happened, then looking at how how it may have had a different outcome, then discuss the effect of the changed outcome on the future .
I’d just started high school in 67, the Six Day War started. Form teacher was telling us about it. The biggest difference was with the tanks. The Israeli tanks have6 forward gears and one reverse, just in case and the Egyptian tanks have 6 reverse gears and one forward gear, just in case. Then laughed. Today he’d be sacked.
Didn’t the Churchill have a much lower gear ratio in reverse? Meaning the tank could reverse up a hill that it couldn’t go up forwards?
(I have no idea why that popped into mind.)
Now that’s an interesting site – I’d like to see them do one on Stalingrad and Kursk.
Winston Smith
January 19, 2025 12:01 pm
Gabor:
Never self raising if you are serious about it.
Resting between kneading is a must, let it rise.
I bought a dough mixer a couple of months ago with an 8 – 10 liter bowl. give it al a very slow stir for a few minutes instead of kneading, then let it rise in the bowl for half an hour or so, do it twice and then let it rise in the tins before the oven. Much easier on the wrists. But on reflection, I think it’s a combination of using a mix of self raising and plain flour* and not enough bread improver. *Don’t ask. Just don’t ask. 🙂
Okay, I won’t ask. I will just assume, correctly most likely. 😀
JC
January 19, 2025 12:23 pm
I finally pulled the plug (literally) and bought an EV. It’s going to be used essentially for very routine driving, to the family business a few days a week, and down the beach. I’m having a BMW charge unit installed later this week and can program the charge time so it’ll cost 5 bucks for a full charge. We’re a three-car family, and the other two cars are petrol.
Gerbil-warming wasn’t even number 77 on the list of 5 reasons: giving the towel heads their vig was.
I know. I’m going to keep it for 8 odd years, and if it’s worth nil after that I really don’t care anyway. I’m writing it from day one. Picking it up tomorrow. I actually got a 33% discount from list, which does suggest they aren’t in huge demand, but it doesn’t worry me. I really wanted to replace this current wagon with the same and its now, only available in EV.
In any event EV made me a serious load of cash in 24, Cronkers. I bought Tesla at decent levels and still have most of the position. Think of it as a form of philanthropy. I made some cashola in an EV company and just giving some of it back – making the world a better place. 🙂
JC, in Delhi, where the air was thick with smog and closed the airport and started to bring about my demise from bronchitis, I started thinking about useful places for EV’s. First point, I don’t like them and think they are a dangerous fire hazard, but second point is that in places where smog happens EV’s might help reduce the particulate pollution and other emisisions. Not worried much about CO2 btw. Delhi like most third world cities runs now on motorised petrol two-wheelers; their fumes are horrible. If some benefactor could produce a cheap EV two wheeler or three wheel tuk tuk it would do the world some good.
Run ’em off cheap nuclear or old style coal fired power, wind, solar, who cares?
All electricity production should be out of town. Large petrol driven cities are not the way of the future.
Fine in Oz, where our pop is small and our spaces large.
During the year before the US Federal election a tall, dark, handsome and charming young bloke, John McEntee popped up many times in a week on Instragram eating a morsel at some fast food outlet while making a rather pointed observation on the Lunacy of the Left/Biden Administration and finishing with a knowing smile.
Well I nearly puked when I saw who thought it a good idea to try the same thing — none other than the ghastly Blackout Bowen — FMD haven’t seen it since — but can you believe it? the short, pasty, thin-lipped, chinless creep who is about as attractive as a canetoad with a personality to match. barrrrffff!!!
Yeah all good, it didn’t help the constitution seeing the creep, while also battling a very severe bout of the flu, but Italian penicillin helped greatly
Slower and slower. Some car guy tried it, overrode the control limits and tested how far it would go before the battery was absolutely exhausted. It was a fun story, but I didn’t keep a link.
If you buy an EV to help save the environment, what do you do with the old one?
Trade it ?
By rights you should have it crushed to keep it off the road
Nice stats posted by Zafiro last evening about the not so illustrious AFL career of professional whinger Tony Armstrong.
Uncontested possessions outnumber contested possessions by a ratio of 4 to 1.
This indicates he is a squib who never got his own ball and relied on cheap hand-offs from others.
Unless they have some mercurial ability to kick goals from behind the hot-dog stand in the forward pocket, these types usually get spun out of the system pretty quickly.
I wonder why he lasted eight years with three clubs with such ordinary stats.
Not a single cross dresser amongst them. Where’s teh diversiteh?
Eyrie
January 19, 2025 1:18 pm
Genuine question: When an EV runs out of charge, does it go slower and slower until it dies out, or does it run at full steam then stop dead? Enquiring minds, etc.
Lithium ion cells tend to catch fire when discharged too far so usually each cell turns itself off when it gets too low so it will just stop. Seen that on my electric drills.
They also can catch fire when over charged (charger and/or battery management system failure) or even when just sitting there minding their own business even under no load.
so you are driving down the highway at 110 kph and your battery dies, and behind you is a large truck.
JC
January 19, 2025 1:22 pm
Ranga:
It was a 2009 or 2010 5 series wagon 530 M. It had 190K on the clock and I got 3 grand as a trade in. Whoopee do.
The gear box feels like it’s about to go.
I was probably swiped for a couple of grand, but I couldn’t be fcked messing around trying to sell it some other way.
Tintarella di Luna
January 19, 2025 1:39 pm
Found it — here is the useless wanker– can’t even find his own script — what an effing tool — check it out sound on if you dare and hang onto your lunch gatti https://www.instagram.com/p/DE3qzNdt7Ay/
Miltonf
January 19, 2025 1:50 pm
The ALP is now nothing more than the local chapter of the Demoratic Party
Israel is out of it’s gourd if it thinks any good will come from releasing thousands of brutal killers in return for a handful of traumatised and dead hostages who the sick bastards kept for just such a reason.
We know all of this, Arky. Israel knows it. But if it was my loved one, I would take the risk. After that, then all bets should be off – whatever the damn agreement.
Recall that over a thousand Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for Gilad Shalit – a single Israeli soldier captured by the mongrels. You need to be an Israeli to understand.
It has been a living hell not only for the Israeli captives (especially the women – & doubly especially for the captured women soldiers) but think about the families. I once ventured to think how I would bear this if one of my dear ones was held in those circumstances, by these animals. I tear up thinking about it.
The Israelis risked the deaths of the hostages simply by bombing Gaza mercilessly. Their generals and their pollies have considered all the options for over a year. The families have exerted unbearable pressure on both.
In my view, get as many hostages out as possible. Promise the bloody world. Then – when the Israelis have done all that can be done ……no more negotiations. They should brief Trump with every solitary dreadful detail. ……
Pogria
January 19, 2025 1:56 pm
If he were a junkie, he’d be entitled to an up to 670.000 a year care package.
Can’t be done, I suspect.
Mark Latham spared no detail and got squashed by Yuge litigation.
Winston Smith
January 19, 2025 2:22 pm
The deal:
Netanyahu is also under enormous pressure domestically from two lots of voters – the Left, and the families of the hostages who want the ceasefire and their family members/bodies returned at any cost.
So when this atrocity is repeated, who will remind them of the price that will have to be paid again, and by whom?
Good question, but we have to be dealing with the here and now.
People are not very good at looking at consequences of actions.
I hope the retaliation will come hard and brutal.
Imagine, just for a moment, if one of your family members was murdered during a normal day’s activity. A peaceful Israeli in Israel minding their own business. A father, a mother, a son, a daughter, maybe a sibling or a cousin …
How would you feel if the murderer was part of the hostage deal?
Pay to get hostages back, and more hostages will be taken. Nuke the bastards and the hostages and the bad guys won’t do it again. Nothing more to be said; the only question is, do you have the guts to confront a horrible truth.
feelthebern
January 19, 2025 2:24 pm
Leaders at Oracle, the main cloud computing provider for TikTok’s U.S. operations, have told some staff to prepare to shut down servers that host U.S. TikTok data on Saturday night as early as around 9 p.m. Eastern, in advance of a U.S. law that bans the app starting Sunday.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz is expected to give the final go ahead to cut off the TikTok servers, according to a person with direct knowledge of the plan. Her involvement reflects the magnitude of the shutdown. The app, owned by China’s ByteDance, says it has 170 million users in the U.S.
A 3.7 magnitude earthquake has rocked houses in WA’s Wheatbelt.
The earthquake was recorded in Meckering, about 150km form Perth, at 11.12am.
More than 150 people have reported feeling the earthquake, with shakes being felt as far as Maida Vale.
Meckering was destroyed by an earthquake 57 years ago, when a quake recording over 7 on the Richter scale reduced many buildings to rubble.
Guess who lives on the Meckering earthquake fault line?
Just seriously, my grandson lives in Newcastle, which suffered a very nasty earthquake a few years ago. Indeed, the Hunter region has been a little shaky of late. So it is one of those many threats that reminds us not to get too cosy.
Please not “Richter”. All earthquakes now are reported in moment magnitude scale. Same idea as Richter regarding logarithmic scale but let’s not be as lazy as the MSM. Just say magnitude 3.7 as ZK2A did.
Eyrie
January 19, 2025 3:04 pm
Hmmm, seems the Trump inauguration isn’t all the Wookie is shunning.
Imagine what would be happening to her if she were Chinese or Russian.
The pair of them would have security police going through their financial records, their travel itinerary, who their friends are, etc etc, and they’d be answering questions though ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.
But I bet they know their pronouns.
Eyrie
January 19, 2025 3:11 pm
Meckering Earthquake: Magnitude 3.7 quake shakes houses in WA’s WheatbeltTaylor
I remember the 1968 quake. Bunch of us in the Physics library on top floor of UWA Physics building. Five stories of brick. Took us about 3 seconds to realise our situation and go down the stairs a half storey at a time. I reckon we were out in 30 seconds. IIRC Meckering was destroyed and rebuilt then flattened again in another quake a few years later.
I remember driving through Meckering soon after the quake. The local pub was in ruins, but there was an 18 gallon beer keg on a trestle table outside with some jugs and glasses, and a large sign that said “The Beer with no Pub.”
Interesting that the Scandiwegia-BeNeLux countries (just about) all climb up after costs+hours adjustments… must be some of that cheap energy/high productivity stuff i keep hearing about
Black Ball
January 19, 2025 3:30 pm
Reports circulating that Max Verstappen will join Aston Martin on an eye watering $1.97b deal.
Erling Haaland will join him as he signs a $510m deal at Manchester City.
Stunning figures.
A full time job spending $900k a week. The Manchester Ferrari dealership was doing the most business in the UK when I was there around 1990. Some seriously nice property once you got out of central Manchester.
I reckon a lot of these obscene sports $$$ is money laundering/dodgy financial stuff. There is no sense in it on face value.
Vicki
January 19, 2025 3:31 pm
Arky, this article may partly answer your questioning of the current Israeli strategy:
What We Have Forgotten About War
Militaries must return to the ancient confidence that it is better to kill more of the aggressors’ population than to have lost some of its own.
Ran Baratz’s sharp critique of Israeli retaliatory action following October 7, coupled with incisive and constructive correctives, is a shared worry outside of Israel. Why, he asks, was the IDF surprised by the attack, why was it shocked that it was so medieval in nature, and why did it take so long to take the war home to Gaza? More to the point, why have not the Israeli Defense Forces thus far after October 7 been able to translate their brilliant operational and tactical victories into favorable strategic resolutions that might have led to more or less permanent victory and an ensuing sustained peace? A short answer is that neither the war nor Israel’s desire to further weaken its enemies is yet over.
Otherwise, those responsible for disconnecting tactical from strategic victory, Baratz argues, are not the spirited and heroic Israeli troops in the fields. Rather, he faults the current generation of military and civilian analysts and strategists. Swept up in the trends of the moment, and amnesiac about the historically unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a tiny Israel surrounded by nations comprising some 500 million Muslims, they became unthinking captives of old cliches and new orthodoxies, many of which are stale carry-overs from the cold war. Such conventional groupthink, Baratz further insists, so far has blocked the normally risk-taking IDF from achieving the complete defeat of its wavering enemies.
Again, these bridles are not unique to Israel. They are even more endemic within the U.S. military as evident in its recent misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Baratz cites some familiar symptoms that explain why the Western tradition of decisive battle to achieve unconditional surrender has become self-limiting—despite its traditional hallmarks of superior firepower, technology, discipline, and organization. The causes of this confusion and indeed often malaise are well known to Western militaries—the diversion of the armed forces to achieve internal social agendas, the preference for media-savvy, political generals over those with distinguished battle records, and the substitution of new technology for the ancient arts of killing the enemy. Yet, such misapprehensions can prove especially fatal to the IDF given the power and number of its potential enemies and Israel’s far smaller margin of error. In the some 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a few years later after the end of the American nuclear monopoly, strategists assumed that any major conventional war in a strategically important locale by definition had to remain limited as a “police action,” often with an aim at “nation-building” and to be ended by a “peace process.”
Ancient aims like unconditional surrender, occupation, and the defeated coerced to embrace the conditions of the victor were supposedly now impossible. To repeat a World War II-like annihilative end of the war, in the era from the Korean to the first Gulf War, might spark the intervention of a nuclear patron to save its tottering client. Soon perhaps a 1914-like, guns-of-August uncontrollable nuclear bellum omnium contra omnes would follow. So Western nations informally sought to fight limited wars even when the danger of nuclear escalation was remote, while the odds of stalemate or defeat thereby increased.
After the end of the cold war, it was felt that self-restraint had somehow contributed to victory over the Soviet Union. Thus, limited warfare would have a renewed life even after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the United States was alone militarily preeminent. There were also internal pressures to mitigate the use of force necessary to ensure the surrender of a defeated enemy. The more affluent and leisured Western capitalist consensual societies grew, the more fertility rates fell, and the more radically egalitarian they became, the more in the post-cold-war era the traditional aims of war to defeat, humiliate, and win concessions from the defeated became constructed not just as unnatural, but anachronistic and pre-civilizational.
So, Westerners live in an age where they have fewer children (and thus cannot imagine losing an only child), expect to live until our late eighties (and thus feel robbed if some extraneous event deprives anyone of our 21st-century birthright), and rarely see any more the once daily violence of killing animals (much less preparing their meat). If there is an innate curiosity to understand violence firsthand, we slake our thirst vicariously through movies, television, and video games. In lieu of something like Appomattox or Potsdam, perhaps enemies could instead be won over by propaganda, nation-building, or reeducation rather than through humiliating defeat. The ultimate trajectory of this thinking was the victorious Taliban in 2021 inheriting $50 billion in sophisticated abandoned American arms, while U.S. troops skedaddled—leaving behind a vacant $1 billion new American embassy, a $300 million-refitted defensible airbase, George Floyd murals on the streets, a pride-flag on the embassy website and flying occasionally at U.S. bases, and a gender-studies department at Kabul university.
Globalism and its instant worldwide communications supposedly also convinced the public that it was almost preferable to lose nobly than to win ugly, given the instinct to therapeutic identification with the underdog and the defeated. Once tiny Israel beat back its many aggressors in 1947 and became a regional power in 1967 and 1973, so too Westerners now considered it a fellow bully and in particular an illegitimate “settler-colonialist” state.
Millions of censors the world over, including the International Criminal Court, will judge Western soldiers from their televisions’ live feeds. In a Western world where half our youth expect to go to college and be trained by PhDs, and not to enter the military, the operating ethos of that half of the population is to contextualize those supposedly misguided enough to attack Westerners. We saw just that on American elite campuses all through 2024, after the October 7 attacks on Israelis. Protests championed Hamas, used rhetorical gymnastics to explain away the barbaric attacks on Israelis, and sought to pressure elected officials to cut off aid to Israel on “humanitarian grounds.”
In an age of scarifying accusations of “imperialism” and “colonialism,” the use of military force in the West itself became somewhat suspect. But far worse still would be the transparent admission of waging war to annihilate an enemy force and thus strip a bellicose opponent of its power of resistance—as the only way to preclude the need to refight the war or descend into what we in the United States now call “endless” or “forever” wars.
So, in the postmodern Western democracies, there arises a certain end-of-history utopianism, in which war is deemed anachronistic and the result of misunderstanding and miscommunication, rather than of innate evil or the desire to gain advantage once perceived deterrence is lost and the stronger can dictate to the weaker.
Classical tactical methods to achieve strategic resolution—preemptive attacks, continual offensive operations, and the use of constant, overwhelming, and disproportionate force—are increasingly deemed passé. Western militaries bowing to civilian or internal concerns about disproportionality, high casualties among the enemy, culpability for striking first, televised carnage, or nuclear brinkmanship insidiously seek instead ways to finesse wars.
How then did this generation of strategists attempt to resist aggression and fight opponents with far fewer self-imposed limits, whether nation-states like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, or terrorists like Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis, and Islamic State?Apparently, they assumed the new revolution in military affairs might offer solutions. Sophisticated drones from on high could pinpoint those “responsible” for enemy aggression, kill them surgically, and thus free the people from their nihilist influence without a messy war. Cyberwarfare could paralyze infrastructure without drawing blood. Or maybe new incarnations of the Maginot Line, updated with sophisticated surveillance cameras, acoustic devices, radars, and drones, and supported by artificial-intelligence and cyber weapons, could achieve deterrence without the old methods of robust preemptive attacks and periodic occupations.
Baratz quite astutely either articulates or implies a range of problems with such tactical thinking. Walls, to work, have to be at least successful in slowing down or attriting the enemy. But as General George S. Patton once wrote, the price of such passivity sometimes inculcates an insidious false sense of security that can be deracinating for a once-preemptive military. Clearly the Gaza fence was hardly indominable. Prior to October 7 it instead perhaps had helped spread a lethal sense that Gazans were mere neighbors on the other side of a deliberately unobtrusive fence rather than obdurate existential foes who would always interpret any trace of restraint or passivity not as magnanimity to be reciprocated but as weakness to be lethally exploited.
Generals and military planners also should not become psychologists who try to outthink enemy populations themselves, as if they alone know how to separate radical and bellicose leaders from their supposedly peace-loving and thus coerced followers. Instead, the ancient idea of overwhelming force and collective punishment remind civilians such as those in Germany in 1944 or Japan in 1945 the real consequences of triumphantly applauding their leaders when winning only to claiming their near innocence when losing.
For a nation-state to survive it must be educated that the only thing worse than war is defeat or a permanent enemy sword of Damocles hanging over its collective head. Militaries must return to the ancient confidence that it is better to kill more of the aggressors’ population than to have lost some of its own. Disproportionality, asymmetry, and a marked difference in material capability and morale alone lead to strategic resolution. So, after heroic and costly efforts to decapitate much, but not all, of the leadership of Hamas and Hizballah, and to destroy much of terrorist infrastructure of Gaza and Hizballah, why cannot Israel forces tactically defeat enemies, force them to “surrender,” and then make them agree to Israeli demands to disarm, dissolve, and disappear? Was the disconnect Israel’s fear that should it try to achieve complete strategic victory, the new axis of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran would intervene with existential threats to cease and desist—or else? Was the problem worries, in and outside the military, that the Westernized world, especially Europe and the United States, would find such unlimited use of force barbaric and thus react by cutting off aid and munitions, and close their doors to Israelis in general?
Was the hesitation attributable to fear within Israel itself that it was transforming into something different, something worse than the once humanitarian vision of the founders (who, it must be said, were quite willing and able to seek strategic resolution to survive)? Given the above, what exactly would Ran Baratz have had the IDF, and its overseers, do to ensure that their tactical victories resulted in final strategic resolution?
All of Israel’s current terrorist enemies are supplied and guided by Iran. After sending 500 projectiles into Israel, and after, in response, Israel had dismantled Iran’s supposedly formidable air defenses, what might have followed had Israel invested another week in destroying Iran’s nuclear capability, with threats to continue on with its military bases and energy sector? Would Iran have been able or willing to supply any further its diminished terrorist appendages?
What if 100 percent of Gaza has been entered, disarmed, occupied, and purged of Hamas terrorists, in the manner that much of it had already? Would Israel have eventually destroyed the entire Hamas leadership, dismantled the entire subterranean labyrinth, and taught the population that Hamas would be a longer politically viable? Would neighboring so-called “moderate” Arab countries have been more or less willing to ally with a formidable, and unpredictable Israel? And would the United States, even under the sanctimonious and sermonizing Biden administration, privately have been more willing to aid Israelis under such vast geopolitical transformations?
Would hostile enclaves and nations, whether in Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, or Yemen, been more or less willing to negotiate with Israel in a post-Hizballah, post-Hamas, and even post-theocratic-Iran era?
I believe Baratz is right not because I wish him to be, but because I think he has a better understanding of human nature than do his opponents, in that he understands that the revolution in military affairs, new weaponry, artificial intelligence, cyberwar, and smart bombs and shells have changed not the rules of war, but merely the velocity and lethality of it.
The more sophisticated we become, the more difficult it becomes to remember that war is fought collectively by humans. Human nature stays constant across time and space. And thus, it remains predictable and subject to universal laws that, if only understood, can mitigate the violence of war—through strategic victory.
The George Patton, who believed himself the reincarnation of warriors gone by, who decided that, since the city of Metz had never been taken by frontal assault, he wanted to be the first to do the deed? I don’t know what causalities he suffered, but, at the time Operation Market Garden was going down in a screaming heap, and official attention was diverted elsewhere.
Good essay. I didn’t see though the one word which sums up the West and indeed any culture at terminal decline: decadence. The West has forgotten the bywords of survival: vigilance, intolerance of the intolerant and consequences. Wokism and the left are our enemy and our so called conservative leaders have been defeated by it. Trump and a few others are the last hope.
Like the mad Muzzies who destroyed the Syrian government in a couple of weeks? Or the Taliban who utterly defeated (mentally as much as physically) the western forces in Afghanistan in a similar period?
Once tiny Israel beat back its many aggressors in 1947 and became a regional power in 1967 and 1973, so too Westerners now considered it a fellow bully and in particular an illegitimate “settler-colonialist” state.
This is too general and transposes the prog-left view to populations as a whole. Even in western Europe & Scandinavia that is not the case; surveys during the conflict have shown variety of opinion on Israel’s position with support for Israel’s right to defend itself by deploying troops to Gaza running at 52% in the UK, 54% in Denmark, 57% in Sweden & 57% in Germany. The view that Israel is an illegitimate state would be confined to the extreme left minority and Muslims.
For a nation-state to survive it must be educated that the only thing worse than war is defeat or a permanent enemy sword of Damocles hanging over its collective head. Militaries must return to the ancient confidence that it is better to kill more of the aggressors’ population than to have lost some of its own. Disproportionality, asymmetry, and a marked difference in material capability and morale alone lead to strategic resolution.
Permanent enemy means permanent war. US was big enough after WWII to transform Germany and Japan after defeating them so that they can no longer be enemies. Israel may not have that option but the US still does and will need to get involved to end the forever war in the Middle East.
Pogria
January 19, 2025 4:14 pm
The Week in Pictures was great. However, this one would have been noticed by much of the rest of the world. Scary.
Israel-Hamas ceasefire: Truce temporary, we’ll fight if we must, Benjamin Netanyahu saysAgencies
12 minutes ago 0 Comments
Israel’s Prime Minister is treating the ceasefire as temporary and said the country retained the right to continue fighting if necessary.
In a national address, Benjamin Netanyahu said he had the support of president-elect Donald Trump, who told NBC News that he told the Prime Minister to “keep doing what you have to do”.
Mr Netanyahu also asserted that he negotiated the best deal possible, even as Israel’s far-right Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said he and most of his party would resign from the government in opposition to it.
The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel will begin on Sunday at 8.30am local time (5.30pm AEDT), as families of hostages held in Gaza braced for news of loved ones, Palestinians prepared to receive freed detainees and humanitarian groups rushed to set up a surge of aid.
Mr Netanyahu had earlier warned that a ceasefire wouldn’t go forward unless Israel received the names of hostages to be released, as agreed. Israel had expected to receive the names from mediator Qatar.
NBN fail!
Half an hour ago, while things were patchy and often not loading properly, I jagged a 90MBPS reading on OOKLA speed test. Yesterday it varied between 75 and 15. Today a little better but still variable.
Just tried again – it couldn’t even kick off the speed test!
Telstra used to do my internet much better than the NBN.
why the Western tradition of decisive battle to achieve unconditional surrender
There has never been such a tradition. Not to end the Thirty Years War, Seven Years War, Napoleonic Wars, War of 1812, and so on.
Militaries must return to the ancient confidence that it is better to kill more of the aggressors’ population than to have lost some of its own. Disproportionality, asymmetry, and a marked difference in material capability and morale alone lead to strategic resolution.
Is this is something you also want to apply to the enemy? You might argue that they will do so anyway, sure, but having admitted the principle as such your essentially admitting he’s be silly not to do so against your own civilian populations. It also ignores Clausewitz’s maxim.
Nope. ABBA got it wrong. ( One night at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender).
The 100 days war , ended the same way as the revolutionary wars and Napoleon’s wars ended with the occupation of the capital.
Issy was the last field engagement of the Hundred Days. There was a campaign against fortresses still commanded by Bonapartist governors that ended with the capitulation of Longwy on 13 September 1815. The Treaty of Paris was signed on 20 November 1815, bringing the Napoleonic Wars to a formal end.
There were several other smaller campaigns that took place in this time as well..
Waterloo took place on 18 June.
After the defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon chose not to remain with the army and attempt to rally it, but return to Paris to try to secure political support for further action. This he failed to do. The two Coalition armies hotly pursued the French army to the gates of Paris, during which time the French, on occasion, turned and fought some delaying actions, in which thousands of men were killed.
Bony didn’t abdicate until 22 June, and didn’t surrender himself until the 15th of July. He abdicated in favour of his son.
With this defeat (Issy) , all hope of holding Paris faded and the French Provisional Government authorised delegates to accept capitulation terms, which led to the Convention of St. Cloud (the surrender of Paris) and the end of hostilities between France and the armies of Blücher and Wellington. (7 July)
Sure, but the Congress of Vienna didn’t rob France of land nor alienate it from the European security architecture then being established. In fact, they were made an integral part of it.
It was never meant to be the dominant cultural expression even by the official definition.
At least he concedes it’s “fragile.”
Time for a rethink, not new laws.
Bespoke
January 19, 2025 5:53 pm
Six years ago today, the media falsely accused catholic teenagers of racism, disrespect, and intolerance, despite an abundance of publicly available videos proving the contrary.
Crossie
January 19, 2025 5:55 pm
Watching the inauguration fireworks on Fox News. One of the songs played was Ave Maria, must have been Melania’s choice.
Apparently Lee Greenwood sang all the songs live, on the balcony near Trump and Melania.
The other thing is the fireworks were at Trump’s golf course in Virginia and he paid for them. I expect he can afford it now that he has over $150M in the inaugural fund, donated mostly by billionaires who want access this time.
feelthebern
January 19, 2025 6:06 pm
Reading on one of the newscorp sites that there are calls for new laws to combat antisemitism in NSW.
This is wrong.
No news laws are needed.
The existing laws need to be enforced.
But that would require some backbone from NSW plod and the NSW govt.
It isn’t looking good. Something suspected for a long time now.
calli
January 19, 2025 6:17 pm
Watching Sky news.
The zombies are back on the streets! The silly old birds have taken their pussy hats out of mothballs. And whingeing about climate change whilst surrounded by the big freeze.
And will still get less than half of the remaining hostages.
Israel Will Release Mass Murderers, Terrorists in Hostage Deal
If they don’t get them all, start razing Gaza to the ground.
‘Million Dollar Listing’ star says up to 70% of Palisades residents will not return after devastating LA fires
If it wasn’t California it’d be a nice place to live.
The Mayor will be happy. The land can be resumed, re-zoned, and high density housing for the “poor” and refugees built there
Another excellent article by Peter Smith, an extract of which follows.
Our Way or the Highway
You might say most Muslims live peaceably. That is true but not to the point. It is a mistake to think that a few can wreak havoc for very long without a groundswell of support. The head dies without the body. Hitler and his henchmen did not attain and survive in power without a strong mass of popular support. Have look at those old newsreels and the adoring crowds.
We have demographic problem. Hate speech laws will damage the fabric of our society without solving it. What then to do? Two things in my view. First, stop all further Muslim immigration. That’s not racist. Religion has nothing to do with race. Religion is a free choice. Second, continue to embrace the existing Muslim population as valued citizens of Australia. But, at the same time, call out without timidity, and ridicule unmercifully, un-Australian behaviour. Some of those Islamic preachers provide rich material for comedians. Monty Python would have field day. Think of Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler.
Beautiful
The evidence to hand is that any Muslim isn’t a valued member of Australian society. They are capable of great acts of violence against every nation they infest, and are incapable of change.
Send them away.
A dog turd is of more value.
Definitely. I might start saving my dogs’ turds. Ammunition.
When you get enough to fill a uniform, send them off to Vicplod.
They are also gold medal rorters and cheats.
Sadly, this was predictable from the time of Al Grassby.
Labour’s tax plans trigger exodus of millionaires from UK
Daniel Pipes’s take in the Paywallion:
Israel ceasefire deal: ‘Victory’ sets up Hamas’ next war
Daniel Pipes
12:00AM
18 January 2025
The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas announced on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) has implications nearly as momentous as the October 7, 2023, massacre that precipitated it.
The deal comes after 15 months of protracted indecision by the government of Israel, during which Jerusalem followed two contradictory policies towards Hamas: destroy the organisation; make a deal with it.
The first policy, victory over Hamas, clearly appealed more to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By my informal count, he mentioned “victory” 216 times in 76 discreet statements, from the immediate aftermath of October 7 to lighting the Hanukkah candles three weeks ago.
At times, as in a statement on French television, his sentences amounted to a barrage of victory talk: “Our victory is your victory,” he said. “Our victory is the victory of Israel against anti-Semitism. It is the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism. It is the victory of France.”
Nor did Netanyahu seek just plain victory. He spoke variously of “absolute victory”, “clear victory”, “complete victory”, “decisive victory”, “full victory” and “total victory”. Of these formulations, “total victory” led the pack, mentioned 81 times and showcased via a “Total Victory” baseball cap during a visit with former president Donald Trump.
Internal Israeli debates confirmed Netanyahu’s preference for victory. For example, Netanyahu banged on the table and told off his national security team, according to Israel’s Channel 12: “You are weak. You don’t know how to run a tough negotiation.” An informed source concluded: “He has given up on the hostages.”
It is pretty lengthy but I can post the rest of it if anyone is interested.
More than a few years ago I regularly read his blog about his take on the middle east.
Rabz I’m sorry but I have to get Crash Craddock’s report on some Cricket Australia phuckwittery:
Patrick Cummins is a moron. As is Ash Gardiner.
The only stakeholders you should be concerned with you dunderheads is the paying public, of which there would be many a black fella among them.
And sensitive discussions? What the hell does that entail? Just another captive to woke dickheads.
Why does she derive her income from a colonial invaders game. Must hurt.
She entirely lacks self awareness. If it wasn’t for the arrival of the first fleet she wouldn’t be playing cricket and receiving the money and recognition she does. She would most likely be being bashed and abused by her male superiors.
Gillespie didnt even know he had any aboriginal ancestors when selected, neither did Boland.
Morning blackball
Bournemouth, what a result.
Brentford – almost.
Leicster in real trouble under the Rudd.
its great seeing where Tottenham and the two Manchester sides are.
Championship no real surprises. Sheffield Utd under Wilder doing great with Burley and Sunderland drawing.
Blackburns run has stopped. Going through a tough patch after steering themselves into the play off.
I am wondering with players being offered big money to play in the Saudi league, China , whether more English players will comprise of the teams.
Feds offered Jeffrey Epstein a deal for incriminating dirt on Trump, ex-cellmate says
And no one else believes it either.
Federalist CEO Sean Davis Drops Stunning Details About The Butler Trump Assassination Attempt In Tucker Carlson Interview
He got exactly what he wanted.
Gavin Newsom rocked by blood-soaked crisis gripping bay area city… as furious residents beg for help
IRS Head Forced to Resign 3 Years Early as Trump Prepares to Drain the Swamp
Overnight, whilst we slept, there was yet another ‘pro-Palestine’ Nazi march in London, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a motley group of left, far-left and Islamist Nazi scum. It’s interesting isn’t it that this march went ahead despite the cease fire agreement. Since October 7 2023 these Nazi marches have occurred almost weekly and the route they’ve been allowed to walk has been smack bang right past a synagogue, London’s Central Synagogue to be precise.
Like here, Jews now avoid parts of inner London and they avoid Central Synagogue. But this time London Plod insisted that the Nazi marchers slightly change their route so the Jews could be left in peace.
Fat chance. Fifteen months of soft policing has empowered and enabled Nazis and Nazism on the streets of the UK and Australia. So, of course the Nazi PSC didn’t like the change of route, nor were they willing to accept the police directive to alter the route slightly.
From the Jewish Chronicle two days ago…
After over a year of the Met taking a soft policing approach to the marches, no matter how frightening the presence of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of fanatical anti-Israel protesters has been for many Jews, it has finally demanded that the next march leaves Jews alone. The PSC have been ordered to change the assembly point so that congregants attending Central Synagogue are free from intimidation by protesters travelling to the march. Over the past year, the synagogue has had to shorten and cancel services. Many congregants have simply stayed away as they are too intimidated to run the gauntlet of the protesters.
The route change ordered by the police is a minor tweak that in no way restricts the protesters from marching. It simply seeks to minimise the impact on Jews going about their business on Shabbat. But the organisers have said that they will ignore the police’s demand. Let us be clear what this means: the PSC considers that the need for them to be able to intimidate Jews is more important than obeying the law.
Like here, these ‘marches’ have never been about ‘Palestine’ or ‘Israel’. They are about Jews, specifically about intimidating and threatening Jews.
The scenes overnight from London are not pretty, the leftist and Muslim Nazi scum tried to push their way through the police lines so that they could walk past the synagogue to intimidate and threaten Jews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4E6DAwq2jw
As I write there are other videos coming in. When they shout, scream and screech the words Free Palestine and From the River to the Sea, they mean……..
Kill Jews
The not-so-great Khan becoming London’s successor to Ken Livingstone was a warning.
@sav_says_
Washington, DC- The beginnings of the Women’s March.
Featuring drag queens up front and signs reading “The Bible never prohibits abortion” and “2.8 million abortions since 2022, you will never stop us”
@GuntherEagleman
Can we deport them too?
@ImMeme0
LMAO
As of today, individuals participating in the “Women’s March” still don’t know what a ‘woman’ is.
Interviewer: “What is a woman?”
Various women reply: “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman.”
A circular argument is not a definition.
My gay sister in law” You are what you identify as “
Emperor of the universe?
I have never seen a refutation of my definition. A woman is an adult female with the potential to conceive and rear a child.
Especially since it would just give Europe an excuse to hang their hat on in relation to attacking X.
@catturd2
Rand Paul just joined TikTok. Lol. I don’t want it banned. It’s a slippery slope.
Sports news (sort of)
I haven’t watched a second of time of her playing, but I’m disappointed that Danielle Collins is not progressing in the tennis. Her personal philosophy is to be admired, encapsulated in her statement “Good luck getting under the skin of someone who doesn’t give a …” . Her taking it to the crowd reveals a moral courage to be admired in these times.
(I rather hope that that the Australian “slam” disappears, or is at least moved out of Melbourne.)
As for the BBL, how can it be taken seriously as a sporting fixture when it’s good players not only move around the teams from one season to another, but just prior to the finals go and play in another competition?
Are you at the Hay truck stop?
If you’d seen what I’ve just seen in India, Sancho, Hay truck stop is the acme of public hygiene.
Arrrgh. Don’t make me think it all through once again.
I need some sleep now. Sleep full of meadows and O2 in the air.
India – a Mercedes parked on a garbage dump. Says it all.
Fascinating, exasperating, and for tomorrow’s thread not today’s.
I like to travel but locally only, due to my phobia about air travel.
Gong on a cruise ship??? Why on earth would you go on a crowded vessel you can’t escape from? Shopping at a mall is bad enough.
But the point I’m trying to get to is, why India? We all know the conditions there, I’d rather watch the magnificent buildings on U-tube and avoid the humdrum and danger of infections, upset tummy etc. of everyday Indian life.
But each to his/her own.
Glad you did it but, and we can read about it. Thanks.
@WallStreetApes
The Supreme Court upholds the TikTok Ban
Many members of Congress bought META stock as they were voting to ban TikTok, they’re getting rich while eliminating their donors competition
Congressman Michael McCaul who wrote The TikTok Ban Bill invested $1.15 Million into META after writing the bill
– On March 3rd, he authored the TikTok Ban Bill
– On March 22nd, he invested $150,000 in META
– On the 26th, he invested another $150,000
– On the 28th, he invested another $150,000
So about three weeks after writing the TikTok Ban Bill, this man invested $450,000 in TikTok’s competitor.
Oh, and then what did he do once he saw his TikTok ban was gonna be included with all the Ukraine funding:
– Well, on April 1st, he invested $350,000 more in META, followed by the fifth where he invested that again.
Then about a week later, of course, he voted yes on the bill he wrote.
So within the span of 40 days, this dude wrote the TikTok ban bill, proceeded to invest $450,000 in the competitor, and then invested another $700,000, taking his total investment and META at a $1.15 million.
And then he voted yes. Now, obviously the word most people are using here is suspicious, but the word we should be using is criminal.
This man wrote the f***** bill to ban TikTok, proceeded to invest more than a million dollars in its competitor, whose stock will skyrocket if TikTok actually gets banned, and then voted on the bill to ban it.
Are you paying attention yet?” #tiktokban It’s all about censorship.
My wife saw the Iranian Princess (Rita) on sky last night. Lefties losing it. Hasn’t laughed so much since the last time I did something stupid. Her comment was, “are these people for real”?
Lefty Tom Connell leads the daytime Sky contingent who scored a trip to America to cover the protests against Trump’s inauguration on Monday. Of course, Trump is a “climate denier” who has no respect for the lefty climate religion, given free rein by Connell this morning in his Never Trump protest roundup from Washington DC.
However, climate is now only the No.2 lefty religion behind Jew hatred, which is being covered devoutly by Sky’s UK affiliate, which has sent its zombies to Israel to campaign against Bibi Netanyahu’s ceasefire deal with the Devil.
Sky Australia has also sent its laziest sod Chris Kenny, who has never broken a story on his 5pm weekday show, to Washington to do the usual talking points from the inauguration.
Meanwhile, Sky Outsiders is back on the air today. The only Sky laggard still on holidays is political editor Andrew Clennell, whose Sunday Agenda program went on vacation in December and still hasn’t returned.
Clennell is no loss.
Chris Kenny has been putting up some good columns for the Oz though.
Stuck on a horse-drawn buggy as world speeds past (Paywallian today)
That’s his latest, but he’s been regularly writing about idiot renewables policies.
I loathe the smarmy leftist clennel.
And hopefully won’t.
Daytime Sky doesn’t have to be just another lefty MSM clique, but it is.
We don’t need more of that. There’s plenty of it in the media already.
Having lefty opinions all day “as part of our broad church mix” is foolish.
Clennell is a dickhead.
Why do need these 10th rate pricks to tell us what is going on in the US? Just seems to be a nice free trip for the meja in crowd.
The days of the foreign correspondent are delightfully quaint. The Quiet American for TV.
I remember being told how the wonderful NBN would make teleconferencing the go and save all those international flight emissions.
Crickets.
Then a sacked Kevin Rudd did more miles than the Luftwaffe as foreign minister.
The trend continues for weddings, funerals and anything else with an excuse for a ride.
For the right people of course.
… and school lessons and homework would be done via computer linked holograms.
And all in place 10 years ago.
Must be true, Kevin’s ads told us.
Combined with Julia’s triple priced sheds for the full Building The Education Revolution ™ effect, no wonder Australian kids lead the world in academic achievement.
Add in an isolated touch of rough stuff and – Bingo – you’ve got the standard US DOJ definition of ‘insurrection’.
FIRE THE LOT
Areff has been calling Winston about Elsie, but there’s been no answer. 😀
I miss Attapuss sooooooooo much.
On returning home Friday to a bleak Sydney storm I sat outside on our verandah in a break in the weather savouring the non-Delhi air and the Currawongs saw me. She’s home! Down they came, and two of the cutest baby Kookas too. I sliced some meat off some frozen stuff and soon had them a little feast. They were all wet, cold and hungry. I then watched them circling around the gully and suddenly sensed Attapuss there beside me in his fave watching spot. His little spirit lives in this gully, keeping an eye on things.
Last nite one young Currawong arrived for some food very late, almost dark, and put on a noisy performance because I was a bit tardy getting it.
Don’t you know I have to be in that tree over there before dark, she lectures me as she hops around as I set the meat out for her.
It is comforting to see life returning to normal.
The ‘pussy hats’ are back in the Mall.
The pathetic dregs of 2017 will all catch pneumonia before being hit by the Trump train. Enjoy losers.
Selected Essays on Political Economy (FEE ed.) | Online Library of Liberty
An English translation of some of Bastiat’s most famous pamphlets, written as part of his opposition to the growth of socialism in France in the 1840s. Contains “What is Seen and What is Not Seen”, “The Law”, and “The State”.
Inquiring minds will find a wealth of texts freely available at this site.
Recommended especially for any young and aspiring ‘free thinkers’ in your family (seeking to think themselves free themselves from socialist indoctrination, that is!)
WIP great as usual; the Hegseth memes are especially good but the California lesbian and dikes ones are great too.
Hamas is “surviving” because everyone from the garbo and dogcatcher up is a Hamas member or official.
Nancy Pelosi has been San Francisco’s representative in the House since 1987 when San Francisco was far less dirty and dangerous than it is now. The fact that she is now 84 years old and in her ten gazillionth term is an indication of San Francisco leftists’ taste for bad governance. San Francisco residents will cheerfully vote for a sinister corruptocrat who affirms the transgender madness over an honest and upright public servant who would set things right in the city, but who refuses to pretend that men can become women.
Charles Barkley Slams ‘Rat-Infested’ San Francisco – PJ Media
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
January 19, 2025 11:00 am
Awaiting for approval
Dutton to revive the long lunch, just don’t order a drink.
Alas the Keating FBT was well in place by the time I started work. The NAB cafeteria was possibly my major source of nourishment during my (short lived) Melbournibad share house days.
On the “UK is farked”, my daughter has just returned from a holiday there.
She was confronted outside Tower Hill station by Mueslis pushing English translations of the Koran onto her. Free copies.
What sort of paper were they printed on?
We should stock up for the next dunny paper shortage.
Last year it was hard to watch Chiefs games because the referees were giving them a helping hand all season.
This season, contrary to social media, the refs has been pretty straight down the line and the Chiefs have managed to win more games this year than they did last year.
Then today the refs put their thumb on the scale and do it pretty blatantly in some occasions.
The Texans still had their opportunities that they screwed up.
Still, no matter the sport when the refs decide the outcome it’s a shit spectacle.
Isn’t the NFL rigged? I have spoken to yanks online who are certain of it.
The left push victimology: 3rd nations, global boiling and islam. All are destructive but I think islam is the worst.
In Dr. Peter Hammond’s book, “Slavery, Terrorism and Islam, (2009)” he documents the way Muslims slowly develop a presence in various countries and as their population numbers build, become more aggressive and assertive about exercising Sharia law.
“Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In its fullest form, it is a complete, total, 100% system of life,” Dr. Hammond notes in his book. “Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components. The religious component is a beard for all of the other components.”
How Islam progressively takes over countries | God Reports
This is how it works, according to Dr. Hammond:
When the Muslim population remains under 2% in a country, they will be seen primarily as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to other citizens.
As the Muslim population reaches 2% to 5%, they begin to recruit from ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, within prisons and street gangs.
“From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population,” Dr. Hammond notes. “For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food” and increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature such food on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply.
“When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions,” Dr. Hammond notes. “In Paris, we are already seeing car-burnings. Any non-Muslim action offends Islam, and results in uprisings and threats, such as in Amsterdam, with opposition to Mohammed cartoons and films about Islam.”
The violence increases when the Muslim population reaches 20%. “After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues,”
“At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare,”
From 60%, persecution of non-believing “infidels” rises significantly, including sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia law as a weapon, and Jizya, a tax placed on infidels,
After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some State-run ethnic cleansing, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out “infidels,” and move toward a 100% Muslim society,
Obviously the categories merge but Hammond has been vindicated in EVERY Western nation which hosts a muzzie population. But make no mistake islam is facilitated by the left in the West. In commie nations the left do not tolerate muzzies.
BB, earlier:
Well, yes.
Unfortunately, a very sizeable chunk of the public at large seem to believe that if one has a particular world-class skill, that person must also be equally skilful in all other fields of endeavour and/or a magnificent human being to boot. Sadly, this is in fact not the case.
This is true across the board, but particularly in sport. A very few examples:
Shane Warne
Pat Cummins
Wayne Carey
Don Bradman
Ray Shaw
David Warner
Hell, I’m not even sure if Ben Roberts-Smith VC is a decent bloke – as proficient as he was in his former career.
The reverse is also true. People brilliant in one particular area tend to think ‘I am awesome at X, therefore I am awesome at everything’. This is why celebrities, and actors in particular feel compelled to offer their opinions on geopolitics, science, geology and medicine.
There are polymaths who are good at everything; someone called me a polymath once.
Clive James was a rolypolymath.
Who are very good at different subjects and draw on them to sole complex problems. I tend to think you’re more like myself, a smart arse.
The 2 are not mutually exclusive; folk can have 2 or more positive attributes; for instance, I am handsome and witty and wise.
… and humble! 🙂
I can rub my belly and pat my head at the same time.
Can you do it in reverse?
Change the hands you normally use?
Warnie was just a simple bogan who enjoyed life to the full and got rewarded handsomely for an obscure skill. In his favour he never pretended to be anything else or lecture to others. Captain Carbon would do well to follow his lead.
Not only a great bowler but kept Liz Hurley happy for a while.
And deserves huge applause for plowing that delicious field!
When Wayne Carey was enjoying one of his periods in exile (for beating up a then girlfriend I think) he was in a Port Melbourne restaurant where I was enjoying a post hangover late breakfast hamburger. Think he lived in the quite upmarket HMAS building or something.
Did you slap him?
Ray Shaw?
Nice lady on The Big Weekend Show:
“It’d be nice for Joe Biden to have a library. Then he could go there and find out what he did”.
Perhaps Barry will take him to lunch one day and try to explain it to him.
Can you really study colouring in books?
HAW!!!
He should build it in his garage where he keeps all his other government documents.
I stumbled across “History Undone with James Hanson” on YouTube. The schtick is they have a regular historian, plus a specialist guest. They have 2 types of episodes , one busting myths , the other examines a historical event( a battle or campaign) , telling us what actually happened, then looking at how how it may have had a different outcome, then discuss the effect of the changed outcome on the future .
The latest is on the 7 Day War , very interesting
Linky…
https://youtu.be/_YV-TPyKngs?feature=shared
I’d just started high school in 67, the Six Day War started. Form teacher was telling us about it. The biggest difference was with the tanks. The Israeli tanks have6 forward gears and one reverse, just in case and the Egyptian tanks have 6 reverse gears and one forward gear, just in case. Then laughed. Today he’d be sacked.
A variation on the Italian vs British tanks of ww2
Didn’t the Churchill have a much lower gear ratio in reverse? Meaning the tank could reverse up a hill that it couldn’t go up forwards?
(I have no idea why that popped into mind.)
Now that’s an interesting site – I’d like to see them do one on Stalingrad and Kursk.
Gabor:
I bought a dough mixer a couple of months ago with an 8 – 10 liter bowl. give it al a very slow stir for a few minutes instead of kneading, then let it rise in the bowl for half an hour or so, do it twice and then let it rise in the tins before the oven.
Much easier on the wrists.
But on reflection, I think it’s a combination of using a mix of self raising and plain flour* and not enough bread improver.
*Don’t ask. Just don’t ask.
🙂
Okay, I won’t ask. I will just assume, correctly most likely. 😀
I finally pulled the plug (literally) and bought an EV. It’s going to be used essentially for very routine driving, to the family business a few days a week, and down the beach. I’m having a BMW charge unit installed later this week and can program the charge time so it’ll cost 5 bucks for a full charge. We’re a three-car family, and the other two cars are petrol.
Gerbil-warming wasn’t even number 77 on the list of 5 reasons: giving the towel heads their vig was.
You do know the wretched things have no resale value.
You should have gone E Type or if you wanted to be really dapper an Austin-Healey.
I know. I’m going to keep it for 8 odd years, and if it’s worth nil after that I really don’t care anyway. I’m writing it from day one. Picking it up tomorrow. I actually got a 33% discount from list, which does suggest they aren’t in huge demand, but it doesn’t worry me. I really wanted to replace this current wagon with the same and its now, only available in EV.
Did you trade in the gas guzzler JC and if you did how much.
In any event EV made me a serious load of cash in 24, Cronkers. I bought Tesla at decent levels and still have most of the position. Think of it as a form of philanthropy. I made some cashola in an EV company and just giving some of it back – making the world a better place. 🙂
JC, in Delhi, where the air was thick with smog and closed the airport and started to bring about my demise from bronchitis, I started thinking about useful places for EV’s. First point, I don’t like them and think they are a dangerous fire hazard, but second point is that in places where smog happens EV’s might help reduce the particulate pollution and other emisisions. Not worried much about CO2 btw. Delhi like most third world cities runs now on motorised petrol two-wheelers; their fumes are horrible. If some benefactor could produce a cheap EV two wheeler or three wheel tuk tuk it would do the world some good.
Run ’em off cheap nuclear or old style coal fired power, wind, solar, who cares?
All electricity production should be out of town. Large petrol driven cities are not the way of the future.
Fine in Oz, where our pop is small and our spaces large.
My first car was an Austin Healy 6/100
I am very jealous. IMO, one of the best looking roofless coupes ever made.
A pity it was powered by a truck engine.
The 3 litre ones fetch a good price these days.
Nobody wanted them in those days.
During the year before the US Federal election a tall, dark, handsome and charming young bloke, John McEntee popped up many times in a week on Instragram eating a morsel at some fast food outlet while making a rather pointed observation on the Lunacy of the Left/Biden Administration and finishing with a knowing smile.
Well I nearly puked when I saw who thought it a good idea to try the same thing — none other than the ghastly Blackout Bowen — FMD haven’t seen it since — but can you believe it? the short, pasty, thin-lipped, chinless creep who is about as attractive as a canetoad with a personality to match. barrrrffff!!!
Tinta, OMG, are you okay?
Yeah all good, it didn’t help the constitution seeing the creep, while also battling a very severe bout of the flu, but Italian penicillin helped greatly
Get well soon, Tinta.
I’ll race you there. 🙂
Genuine question:
When an EV runs out of charge, does it go slower and slower until it dies out, or does it run at full steam then stop dead?
Enquiring minds, etc.
Slower and slower. Some car guy tried it, overrode the control limits and tested how far it would go before the battery was absolutely exhausted. It was a fun story, but I didn’t keep a link.
Apparently you can get rechargeble dildos these days.
A friend told me that.
My battery powered mower just stopped yesterday
saturday overton musings
From the link in the Bad Cattitude article.
Why Europe Fears Free Speech
If you buy an EV to help save the environment, what do you do with the old one?
Trade it ?
By rights you should have it crushed to keep it off the road
Yes.
@catturd2
?There’s a huge security issue going on here.
This has nothing to do with the weather.
But will he really be 47? Won’t he be 45 again?
It’s the 47th Presidential term.
Nice stats posted by Zafiro last evening about the not so illustrious AFL career of professional whinger Tony Armstrong.
Uncontested possessions outnumber contested possessions by a ratio of 4 to 1.
This indicates he is a squib who never got his own ball and relied on cheap hand-offs from others.
Unless they have some mercurial ability to kick goals from behind the hot-dog stand in the forward pocket, these types usually get spun out of the system pretty quickly.
I wonder why he lasted eight years with three clubs with such ordinary stats.
Im bleck.
A sheepdog, to use the vernacular.
Never, ever to be found at the bottom of a pack. Detestable.
Unlike the Mosman pirate in a different code but just as, if not more detestable. I reckon our own forwards trampled him on the bottom of the ruck.
@bennyjohnson
Holy Smokes
The New Trump Cabinet just Assembled for their first group photo and it literally looks like team America
Will you get tired of winning?
don’t ever because the left never sleeps
People said that in 2019
That photo sums it up; personally I think biden and most of the demorats should be strung over ants nests.
Not a single cross dresser amongst them. Where’s teh diversiteh?
Genuine question:
When an EV runs out of charge, does it go slower and slower until it dies out, or does it run at full steam then stop dead?
Enquiring minds, etc.
Lithium ion cells tend to catch fire when discharged too far so usually each cell turns itself off when it gets too low so it will just stop. Seen that on my electric drills.
They also can catch fire when over charged (charger and/or battery management system failure) or even when just sitting there minding their own business even under no load.
so you are driving down the highway at 110 kph and your battery dies, and behind you is a large truck.
Ranga:
It was a 2009 or 2010 5 series wagon 530 M. It had 190K on the clock and I got 3 grand as a trade in. Whoopee do.
The gear box feels like it’s about to go.
I was probably swiped for a couple of grand, but I couldn’t be fcked messing around trying to sell it some other way.
Found it — here is the useless wanker– can’t even find his own script — what an effing tool — check it out sound on if you dare and hang onto your lunch gatti https://www.instagram.com/p/DE3qzNdt7Ay/
The ALP is now nothing more than the local chapter of the Demoratic Party
Half a million new Labor jobs. Thanks Bill!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ghnbu0TasAAjmnD?format=jpg&name=large
Israel is out of it’s gourd if it thinks any good will come from releasing thousands of brutal killers in return for a handful of traumatised and dead hostages who the sick bastards kept for just such a reason.
May not happen.
Hamas not provided Israel list of hostages for release Sunday (19 Jan)
If Hamas don’t do what they agreed in the next few hours the deal is dead.
Good.
We know all of this, Arky. Israel knows it. But if it was my loved one, I would take the risk. After that, then all bets should be off – whatever the damn agreement.
Recall that over a thousand Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for Gilad Shalit – a single Israeli soldier captured by the mongrels. You need to be an Israeli to understand.
It has been a living hell not only for the Israeli captives (especially the women – & doubly especially for the captured women soldiers) but think about the families. I once ventured to think how I would bear this if one of my dear ones was held in those circumstances, by these animals. I tear up thinking about it.
The Israelis risked the deaths of the hostages simply by bombing Gaza mercilessly. Their generals and their pollies have considered all the options for over a year. The families have exerted unbearable pressure on both.
In my view, get as many hostages out as possible. Promise the bloody world. Then – when the Israelis have done all that can be done ……no more negotiations. They should brief Trump with every solitary dreadful detail. ……
If he were a junkie, he’d be entitled to an up to 670.000 a year care package.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14286023/Aussie-dad-kidney-failure-Centrelink.html
cohenite
January 19, 2025 11:29 am
There are polymaths who are good at everything; someone called me a polymath once.
NY comic Aaron Berg has a bit about calling yourself a polymath is gay code to say you are a top and a bottom.
Please elaborate, sparing no detail. Us non-gay folk regard information about the gay community as necessary; as in a know thy enemy way.
Can’t be done, I suspect.
Mark Latham spared no detail and got squashed by Yuge litigation.
The deal:
Netanyahu is also under enormous pressure domestically from two lots of voters – the Left, and the families of the hostages who want the ceasefire and their family members/bodies returned at any cost.
So when this atrocity is repeated, who will remind them of the price that will have to be paid again, and by whom?
Good question, but we have to be dealing with the here and now.
People are not very good at looking at consequences of actions.
I hope the retaliation will come hard and brutal.
So do I Kevin
Imagine, just for a moment, if one of your family members was murdered during a normal day’s activity. A peaceful Israeli in Israel minding their own business. A father, a mother, a son, a daughter, maybe a sibling or a cousin …
How would you feel if the murderer was part of the hostage deal?
Retaliation and retribution hard and fast.
Pay to get hostages back, and more hostages will be taken. Nuke the bastards and the hostages and the bad guys won’t do it again. Nothing more to be said; the only question is, do you have the guts to confront a horrible truth.
Leaders at Oracle, the main cloud computing provider for TikTok’s U.S. operations, have told some staff to prepare to shut down servers that host U.S. TikTok data on Saturday night as early as around 9 p.m. Eastern, in advance of a U.S. law that bans the app starting Sunday.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz is expected to give the final go ahead to cut off the TikTok servers, according to a person with direct knowledge of the plan. Her involvement reflects the magnitude of the shutdown. The app, owned by China’s ByteDance, says it has 170 million users in the U.S.
TikTok is one of Oracle’s biggest cloud customers, and Oracle has warned shareholders that the ban would hurt its revenue and profits.
It will be fascinating to see how the US TikTok ban impacts everything like power usage & server speeds.
Much faster speeds? Without the traffic from dancing trannies, crying leftards and bitching welfare parasites?
Without NFL clips, without the college football championship match clips, without every US news service reporting on the inauguration.
177mill Americans have the app and over 10mill businesses.
Depending on who you listen to Trump had between 5bill & 8bill views of his content.
It aint all leftards that use it.
Hmmm, seems the Trump inauguration isn’t all the Wookie is shunning.
Interesting woman in a way. She was handed the Presidency on a plate but didn’t want it and ran screaming away. I respect that.
I wonder who gets which house?
More self esteem than Sleepy Joe obviously.
Things haven’t been going too well since the chef turned up dead. Makes you wonder.
Loosing a personal chef can be traumatic. Trust me.
Meckering Earthquake: Magnitude 3.7 quake shakes houses in WA’s WheatbeltTaylor RenoufPerthNow
Sun, 19 January 2025 11:37AM
Comments
A 3.7 magnitude earthquake has rocked houses in WA’s Wheatbelt.
The earthquake was recorded in Meckering, about 150km form Perth, at 11.12am.
More than 150 people have reported feeling the earthquake, with shakes being felt as far as Maida Vale.
Meckering was destroyed by an earthquake 57 years ago, when a quake recording over 7 on the Richter scale reduced many buildings to rubble.
Guess who lives on the Meckering earthquake fault line?
Get ready to run, Zulu!
Just seriously, my grandson lives in Newcastle, which suffered a very nasty earthquake a few years ago. Indeed, the Hunter region has been a little shaky of late. So it is one of those many threats that reminds us not to get too cosy.
A 3.7 would barely put a head on a half flat beer.
A 7.0 quake is 1,000 times stronger than a 4.0.
10,000 times even.
Did you say to the missus, ” was that good or an earthquake”
the Richter Scale refers to magnitudes on the seismometer
a 7 v 3
it’s 1000x bigger on the seismometer
but about 30000x more energy release on the real world
typo … \
a 7 v 4
1000x bigger on the seismometer
about 30000x more energy release on the real world
a 7 v 3
10000x bigger on the seismometer
about 1000000x more energy release on the real world
Please not “Richter”. All earthquakes now are reported in moment magnitude scale. Same idea as Richter regarding logarithmic scale but let’s not be as lazy as the MSM. Just say magnitude 3.7 as ZK2A did.
Hmmm, seems the Trump inauguration isn’t all the Wookie is shunning.
What is happening?
Imagine what would be happening to her if she were Chinese or Russian.
The pair of them would have security police going through their financial records, their travel itinerary, who their friends are, etc etc, and they’d be answering questions though ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.
But I bet they know their pronouns.
Meckering Earthquake: Magnitude 3.7 quake shakes houses in WA’s WheatbeltTaylor
I remember the 1968 quake. Bunch of us in the Physics library on top floor of UWA Physics building. Five stories of brick. Took us about 3 seconds to realise our situation and go down the stairs a half storey at a time. I reckon we were out in 30 seconds.
IIRC Meckering was destroyed and rebuilt then flattened again in another quake a few years later.
I remember driving through Meckering soon after the quake. The local pub was in ruins, but there was an 18 gallon beer keg on a trestle table outside with some jugs and glasses, and a large sign that said “The Beer with no Pub.”
… Air Force Pilot Posting on Chinese Data Gathering App
Some people have no idea of Opsec. What do they teach USAF officers nowadays?
Tucking.
Biden’s team ‘determined to inflict’ as much damage as possible before leaving office
Top countries using 3 measures of GDP.
We aren’t anywhere near the top;
https://x.com/heimbergecon/status/1879504352119005520
Interesting that the Scandiwegia-BeNeLux countries (just about) all climb up after costs+hours adjustments… must be some of that cheap energy/high productivity stuff i keep hearing about
Reports circulating that Max Verstappen will join Aston Martin on an eye watering $1.97b deal.
Erling Haaland will join him as he signs a $510m deal at Manchester City.
Stunning figures.
Join him on the rich list I should have said
Aston Villa?
Formula One
Thanks. Some of these names confuse me.
A full time job spending $900k a week. The Manchester Ferrari dealership was doing the most business in the UK when I was there around 1990. Some seriously nice property once you got out of central Manchester.
I reckon a lot of these obscene sports $$$ is money laundering/dodgy financial stuff. There is no sense in it on face value.
Arky, this article may partly answer your questioning of the current Israeli strategy:
What We Have Forgotten About War
Militaries must return to the ancient confidence that it is better to kill more of the aggressors’ population than to have lost some of its own.
Ran Baratz’s sharp critique of Israeli retaliatory action following October 7, coupled with incisive and constructive correctives, is a shared worry outside of Israel. Why, he asks, was the IDF surprised by the attack, why was it shocked that it was so medieval in nature, and why did it take so long to take the war home to Gaza?
More to the point, why have not the Israeli Defense Forces thus far after October 7 been able to translate their brilliant operational and tactical victories into favorable strategic resolutions that might have led to more or less permanent victory and an ensuing sustained peace? A short answer is that neither the war nor Israel’s desire to further weaken its enemies is yet over.
Otherwise, those responsible for disconnecting tactical from strategic victory, Baratz argues, are not the spirited and heroic Israeli troops in the fields. Rather, he faults the current generation of military and civilian analysts and strategists. Swept up in the trends of the moment, and amnesiac about the historically unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a tiny Israel surrounded by nations comprising some 500 million Muslims, they became unthinking captives of old cliches and new orthodoxies, many of which are stale carry-overs from the cold war.
Such conventional groupthink, Baratz further insists, so far has blocked the normally risk-taking IDF from achieving the complete defeat of its wavering enemies.
Again, these bridles are not unique to Israel. They are even more endemic within the U.S. military as evident in its recent misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Baratz cites some familiar symptoms that explain why the Western tradition of decisive battle to achieve unconditional surrender has become self-limiting—despite its traditional hallmarks of superior firepower, technology, discipline, and organization. The causes of this confusion and indeed often malaise are well known to Western militaries—the diversion of the armed forces to achieve internal social agendas, the preference for media-savvy, political generals over those with distinguished battle records, and the substitution of new technology for the ancient arts of killing the enemy. Yet, such misapprehensions can prove especially fatal to the IDF given the power and number of its potential enemies and Israel’s far smaller margin of error.
In the some 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a few years later after the end of the American nuclear monopoly, strategists assumed that any major conventional war in a strategically important locale by definition had to remain limited as a “police action,” often with an aim at “nation-building” and to be ended by a “peace process.”
Ancient aims like unconditional surrender, occupation, and the defeated coerced to embrace the conditions of the victor were supposedly now impossible. To repeat a World War II-like annihilative end of the war, in the era from the Korean to the first Gulf War, might spark the intervention of a nuclear patron to save its tottering client. Soon perhaps a 1914-like, guns-of-August uncontrollable nuclear bellum omnium contra omnes would follow.
So Western nations informally sought to fight limited wars even when the danger of nuclear escalation was remote, while the odds of stalemate or defeat thereby increased.
After the end of the cold war, it was felt that self-restraint had somehow contributed to victory over the Soviet Union. Thus, limited warfare would have a renewed life even after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the United States was alone militarily preeminent.
There were also internal pressures to mitigate the use of force necessary to ensure the surrender of a defeated enemy. The more affluent and leisured Western capitalist consensual societies grew, the more fertility rates fell, and the more radically egalitarian they became, the more in the post-cold-war era the traditional aims of war to defeat, humiliate, and win concessions from the defeated became constructed not just as unnatural, but anachronistic and pre-civilizational.
So, Westerners live in an age where they have fewer children (and thus cannot imagine losing an only child), expect to live until our late eighties (and thus feel robbed if some extraneous event deprives anyone of our 21st-century birthright), and rarely see any more the once daily violence of killing animals (much less preparing their meat). If there is an innate curiosity to understand violence firsthand, we slake our thirst vicariously through movies, television, and video games.
In lieu of something like Appomattox or Potsdam, perhaps enemies could instead be won over by propaganda, nation-building, or reeducation rather than through humiliating defeat. The ultimate trajectory of this thinking was the victorious Taliban in 2021 inheriting $50 billion in sophisticated abandoned American arms, while U.S. troops skedaddled—leaving behind a vacant $1 billion new American embassy, a $300 million-refitted defensible airbase, George Floyd murals on the streets, a pride-flag on the embassy website and flying occasionally at U.S. bases, and a gender-studies department at Kabul university.
Globalism and its instant worldwide communications supposedly also convinced the public that it was almost preferable to lose nobly than to win ugly, given the instinct to therapeutic identification with the underdog and the defeated. Once tiny Israel beat back its many aggressors in 1947 and became a regional power in 1967 and 1973, so too Westerners now considered it a fellow bully and in particular an illegitimate “settler-colonialist” state.
Millions of censors the world over, including the International Criminal Court, will judge Western soldiers from their televisions’ live feeds. In a Western world where half our youth expect to go to college and be trained by PhDs, and not to enter the military, the operating ethos of that half of the population is to contextualize those supposedly misguided enough to attack Westerners. We saw just that on American elite campuses all through 2024, after the October 7 attacks on Israelis. Protests championed Hamas, used rhetorical gymnastics to explain away the barbaric attacks on Israelis, and sought to pressure elected officials to cut off aid to Israel on “humanitarian grounds.”
In an age of scarifying accusations of “imperialism” and “colonialism,” the use of military force in the West itself became somewhat suspect. But far worse still would be the transparent admission of waging war to annihilate an enemy force and thus strip a bellicose opponent of its power of resistance—as the only way to preclude the need to refight the war or descend into what we in the United States now call “endless” or “forever” wars.
So, in the postmodern Western democracies, there arises a certain end-of-history utopianism, in which war is deemed anachronistic and the result of misunderstanding and miscommunication, rather than of innate evil or the desire to gain advantage once perceived deterrence is lost and the stronger can dictate to the weaker.
Classical tactical methods to achieve strategic resolution—preemptive attacks, continual offensive operations, and the use of constant, overwhelming, and disproportionate force—are increasingly deemed passé. Western militaries bowing to civilian or internal concerns about disproportionality, high casualties among the enemy, culpability for striking first, televised carnage, or nuclear brinkmanship insidiously seek instead ways to finesse wars.
How then did this generation of strategists attempt to resist aggression and fight opponents with far fewer self-imposed limits, whether nation-states like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, or terrorists like Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis, and Islamic State?Apparently, they assumed the new revolution in military affairs might offer solutions. Sophisticated drones from on high could pinpoint those “responsible” for enemy aggression, kill them surgically, and thus free the people from their nihilist influence without a messy war. Cyberwarfare could paralyze infrastructure without drawing blood.
Or maybe new incarnations of the Maginot Line, updated with sophisticated surveillance cameras, acoustic devices, radars, and drones, and supported by artificial-intelligence and cyber weapons, could achieve deterrence without the old methods of robust preemptive attacks and periodic occupations.
Baratz quite astutely either articulates or implies a range of problems with such tactical thinking. Walls, to work, have to be at least successful in slowing down or attriting the enemy. But as General George S. Patton once wrote, the price of such passivity sometimes inculcates an insidious false sense of security that can be deracinating for a once-preemptive military.
Clearly the Gaza fence was hardly indominable. Prior to October 7 it instead perhaps had helped spread a lethal sense that Gazans were mere neighbors on the other side of a deliberately unobtrusive fence rather than obdurate existential foes who would always interpret any trace of restraint or passivity not as magnanimity to be reciprocated but as weakness to be lethally exploited.
Generals and military planners also should not become psychologists who try to outthink enemy populations themselves, as if they alone know how to separate radical and bellicose leaders from their supposedly peace-loving and thus coerced followers. Instead, the ancient idea of overwhelming force and collective punishment remind civilians such as those in Germany in 1944 or Japan in 1945 the real consequences of triumphantly applauding their leaders when winning only to claiming their near innocence when losing.
For a nation-state to survive it must be educated that the only thing worse than war is defeat or a permanent enemy sword of Damocles hanging over its collective head. Militaries must return to the ancient confidence that it is better to kill more of the aggressors’ population than to have lost some of its own. Disproportionality, asymmetry, and a marked difference in material capability and morale alone lead to strategic resolution.
So, after heroic and costly efforts to decapitate much, but not all, of the leadership of Hamas and Hizballah, and to destroy much of terrorist infrastructure of Gaza and Hizballah, why cannot Israel forces tactically defeat enemies, force them to “surrender,” and then make them agree to Israeli demands to disarm, dissolve, and disappear?
Was the disconnect Israel’s fear that should it try to achieve complete strategic victory, the new axis of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran would intervene with existential threats to cease and desist—or else?
Was the problem worries, in and outside the military, that the Westernized world, especially Europe and the United States, would find such unlimited use of force barbaric and thus react by cutting off aid and munitions, and close their doors to Israelis in general?
Was the hesitation attributable to fear within Israel itself that it was transforming into something different, something worse than the once humanitarian vision of the founders (who, it must be said, were quite willing and able to seek strategic resolution to survive)?
Given the above, what exactly would Ran Baratz have had the IDF, and its overseers, do to ensure that their tactical victories resulted in final strategic resolution?
All of Israel’s current terrorist enemies are supplied and guided by Iran. After sending 500 projectiles into Israel, and after, in response, Israel had dismantled Iran’s supposedly formidable air defenses, what might have followed had Israel invested another week in destroying Iran’s nuclear capability, with threats to continue on with its military bases and energy sector? Would Iran have been able or willing to supply any further its diminished terrorist appendages?
What if 100 percent of Gaza has been entered, disarmed, occupied, and purged of Hamas terrorists, in the manner that much of it had already? Would Israel have eventually destroyed the entire Hamas leadership, dismantled the entire subterranean labyrinth, and taught the population that Hamas would be a longer politically viable?
Would neighboring so-called “moderate” Arab countries have been more or less willing to ally with a formidable, and unpredictable Israel? And would the United States, even under the sanctimonious and sermonizing Biden administration, privately have been more willing to aid Israelis under such vast geopolitical transformations?
Would hostile enclaves and nations, whether in Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, or Yemen, been more or less willing to negotiate with Israel in a post-Hizballah, post-Hamas, and even post-theocratic-Iran era?
I believe Baratz is right not because I wish him to be, but because I think he has a better understanding of human nature than do his opponents, in that he understands that the revolution in military affairs, new weaponry, artificial intelligence, cyberwar, and smart bombs and shells have changed not the rules of war, but merely the velocity and lethality of it.
The more sophisticated we become, the more difficult it becomes to remember that war is fought collectively by humans. Human nature stays constant across time and space. And thus, it remains predictable and subject to universal laws that, if only understood, can mitigate the violence of war—through strategic victory.
“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
Patton was right.
The George Patton, who believed himself the reincarnation of warriors gone by, who decided that, since the city of Metz had never been taken by frontal assault, he wanted to be the first to do the deed? I don’t know what causalities he suffered, but, at the time Operation Market Garden was going down in a screaming heap, and official attention was diverted elsewhere.
Good essay. I didn’t see though the one word which sums up the West and indeed any culture at terminal decline: decadence. The West has forgotten the bywords of survival: vigilance, intolerance of the intolerant and consequences. Wokism and the left are our enemy and our so called conservative leaders have been defeated by it. Trump and a few others are the last hope.
“Strategic victory”?
Like the mad Muzzies who destroyed the Syrian government in a couple of weeks? Or the Taliban who utterly defeated (mentally as much as physically) the western forces in Afghanistan in a similar period?
That kind of strategic victory?
This is too general and transposes the prog-left view to populations as a whole. Even in western Europe & Scandinavia that is not the case; surveys during the conflict have shown variety of opinion on Israel’s position with support for Israel’s right to defend itself by deploying troops to Gaza running at 52% in the UK, 54% in Denmark, 57% in Sweden & 57% in Germany. The view that Israel is an illegitimate state would be confined to the extreme left minority and Muslims.
Source: YouGov NOV 2024
Permanent enemy means permanent war. US was big enough after WWII to transform Germany and Japan after defeating them so that they can no longer be enemies. Israel may not have that option but the US still does and will need to get involved to end the forever war in the Middle East.
The Week in Pictures was great. However, this one would have been noticed by much of the rest of the world. Scary.
My thought was it should have read “lets muzzies do whatever with no repercussions”.
Have I missed something? I go to TWIP and the latest I can see is last weekend’s issue. Have they changed their URL or something?
I had to scroll halfway down the main page to a link entitled
The week in pictures: two days to go
Doesn’t appear under the usual menu at the top of the page.
Success! Thank you, thank you!
Israel-Hamas ceasefire: Truce temporary, we’ll fight if we must, Benjamin Netanyahu saysAgencies
12 minutes ago
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Israel’s Prime Minister is treating the ceasefire as temporary and said the country retained the right to continue fighting if necessary.
In a national address, Benjamin Netanyahu said he had the support of president-elect Donald Trump, who told NBC News that he told the Prime Minister to “keep doing what you have to do”.
Mr Netanyahu also asserted that he negotiated the best deal possible, even as Israel’s far-right Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said he and most of his party would resign from the government in opposition to it.
The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel will begin on Sunday at 8.30am local time (5.30pm AEDT), as families of hostages held in Gaza braced for news of loved ones, Palestinians prepared to receive freed detainees and humanitarian groups rushed to set up a surge of aid.
Mr Netanyahu had earlier warned that a ceasefire wouldn’t go forward unless Israel received the names of hostages to be released, as agreed. Israel had expected to receive the names from mediator Qatar.
Netanyahu: Ceasefire won’t begin until Hamas provides list of hostages to be released (JPost)
Updated: JANUARY 19, 2025 07:52
Forty minutes for Hamas to do as the signed agreement requires. The deal is supposed to start at 08:30.
Hamas is playing stupid games. When you do that you tend to win stupid prizes.
I have learned something here today, which is that if you want a decent quota of downticks, you have to:
Be aggressive
B-E aggressive
B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E
NBN fail!
Half an hour ago, while things were patchy and often not loading properly, I jagged a 90MBPS reading on OOKLA speed test. Yesterday it varied between 75 and 15. Today a little better but still variable.
Just tried again – it couldn’t even kick off the speed test!
Telstra used to do my internet much better than the NBN.
Key problems with his argument,
There has never been such a tradition. Not to end the Thirty Years War, Seven Years War, Napoleonic Wars, War of 1812, and so on.
Is this is something you also want to apply to the enemy? You might argue that they will do so anyway, sure, but having admitted the principle as such your essentially admitting he’s be silly not to do so against your own civilian populations. It also ignores Clausewitz’s maxim.
Sigh!
The Napoleonic Wars ended with his decisive defeat at Waterloo.
Nope. ABBA got it wrong. ( One night at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender).
The 100 days war , ended the same way as the revolutionary wars and Napoleon’s wars ended with the occupation of the capital.
There were several other smaller campaigns that took place in this time as well..
Waterloo took place on 18 June.
Bony didn’t abdicate until 22 June, and didn’t surrender himself until the 15th of July. He abdicated in favour of his son.
More here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Days
Sure, but the Congress of Vienna didn’t rob France of land nor alienate it from the European security architecture then being established. In fact, they were made an integral part of it.
Yes; that article is off the mark on several counts.
Beginning with that, although I took it as the editor’s subtitle (with something lost in translation?).
Elizabeth Warren and Other Democrats Sent Threatening Letters to People Who Donated to Trump’s Inauguration
Warren is an evil, hypocritical bitch in a party which has no shortage of them.
Warren is truly evil and psychopathic. A foul old phony.
Never came back from Pocahontas. Trump destroyed her, among others. A one man wrecking ball. Long may it continue.
Eyrie
January 19, 2025 3:11 pm
I was doing second year Physics at UWA in 1968. If you don’t mind me asking what year were you in?
Third year.
Minn-some is dropping the mild-mannered everyman shtick.
https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2025/01/australia-needs-censorship-to-protect-multiculturalism-chris-minns.html#comments
Suspected two faced moron confirmed.
It’s not multiculturalism that he wants to protect but Labor’s election prospects.
That is exactly what I thought when I listened to the weasel.
It was never meant to be the dominant cultural expression even by the official definition.
At least he concedes it’s “fragile.”
Time for a rethink, not new laws.
Watching the inauguration fireworks on Fox News. One of the songs played was Ave Maria, must have been Melania’s choice.
Apparently Lee Greenwood sang all the songs live, on the balcony near Trump and Melania.
The other thing is the fireworks were at Trump’s golf course in Virginia and he paid for them. I expect he can afford it now that he has over $150M in the inaugural fund, donated mostly by billionaires who want access this time.
Reading on one of the newscorp sites that there are calls for new laws to combat antisemitism in NSW.
This is wrong.
No news laws are needed.
The existing laws need to be enforced.
But that would require some backbone from NSW plod and the NSW govt.
“calls”
Meh.
I’d like to Thatcher those claims to “calls”. The source would be educational.
Minns.
Typical.
This could have been nipped in the bud at the Opera House or in the immediate response to that incident.
Now he wants more powers to compensate for police inaction that has subsequently emboldened the offenders who view it as weakness.
Is there any chance the Liberal leader in NSW will offer a critique of this proposal instead of saying “Me too!”?
There is a deadline.
12 noon Jan 20th, US east coast time.
Ceasefire delayed because of “technical field reasons”.
Did someone send the list by pager?
Hamas refusing to hand over any hostages regardless of their condition?
It isn’t looking good. Something suspected for a long time now.
Watching Sky news.
The zombies are back on the streets! The silly old birds have taken their pussy hats out of mothballs. And whingeing about climate change whilst surrounded by the big freeze.
Time to buy popcorn.
BBC Worldwide radio told me early this morning that 8 years ago 500,00 marched, and today 50,000 marched. Interesting if true.
aaaargh 500,000 vs 50,000. Maybe it was the weather!
Some of the twitter stuff I’ve seen would put the number closer to 500 hardcore loons.
I can hear the train a cummin!
I hope we are getting the screaming at the sky ladies.
Saw the silly old biddy. I wonder if she notices it gets dark at night.
BREAKING: IDF spokesman says Hamas didn’t provide the list of the hostages that are supposed to be released on