When you can't live without bananas

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Tuesday, July 01, 2025

Links - 1st July 2025 (2)

Meme - *Shoppers Drug Mart*
"9.99 9.98. Save 01c"

Meme - "If you're anti-fascist, why do you want the government to control everything?"

Meme - "Islam is solution for humantty"
"Countries where Islam is the major religion
"Sudan Iraq Lebanon Syria Afghanistan Somalia Yemen Libya Gaza"

Meme - alex đŸłïžâ€âš§ïž @cyberdogalex: "a ‘pedophile purge’ of any kind would be both bigoted and a disaster for the left as a whole. anyone advocating for any kind of purge (aside from maybe a Nazi purge) is a terrible person"
"posthuman communist, filmmaker, and art critic ❀ @thranitten @blueisabug ❀ // escape velocity //"
This is telling

Meme - "PornHub employee appears on Reddit AMA criticizing their forced incest porn trend to say that it is "antisemitic rhetoric." Thing is, no one brought up the Jews. She quickly edited her comment."

Meme - "GoING To A PARTY
WORST-CASE: "UGH, WHO INVITED THAT GUY?" "HE THOUGHT THAT SHIRT WAS A GOOD IDEA?"
BEST CASE: Girls on guy in mosh pit: "WHO IS THAT GUY?"
WHAT'S MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN
*People sitting on sofas* "I THINK I MIGHT HEAD HOME SOON" "YEAH, ME TOO"
DRIVING
WORST-CASE: "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?" *Multi vehicle flaming pile up*
BEST-CASE: Man in convertible with scarf in wind: "FREEDOM!"
WHATS MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN
"UGH, I-65 TRAFFIC ALWAYS SUCKS AT THIS TIME"
Radio: "AND UP AGAIN, THAT POP SONG YOU'RE INDIFFERENT TO!"
GOING ON A FIRST DATE
WORST-CASE: "Well, hello there, Isabella Martinez who lives at 365 Sunset Avenue"
BEST-CASE: "Before tonight, I thought the idea of a soulmate was a myth..." *curled up under blanket before fireplace*
WHATS MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN: *man and woman at bar* "OH, YOU HAVE TWO SISTERS?" "YEAH, THEY'RE FINE."
GIVING A SPEECH
WORST-CASE: "TECHNICAL ERROR: EVERYTHING IS BAD" "YOU'RE A FRAUD!" "BOO!" *man throwing chair*
BEST-CASE: "WORLD PROBLEMS SOLVED" "Here's a book deal!" "Have my babies!"
WHATS MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN: "IN CONCLUSION, WE SHOULD CHANGE SOME THINGS, BuT NOT EVERYTHING."
"THAT SOUNDS REASONABLE"
Worst Case vs. Best Case Scenarios by Karina Farek
"This is a great joke, but it's also a wonderful strategy for reducing anxiety that I learned about in therapy. If you're ever nervous about something, just ask yourself: what's the best thing that can happen? What's the worst thing? What will most likely happen? it does wonders for your nerves, really does."
"My counsellor walks me through this all the time and it works??"

Noah Smith 🐇 on X - "One really great education policy is to just remove disruptive kids from class and put them somewhere else (and I say this as a former disruptive kid)"
D on X - "This is the real value of private school, this and social networking. Very few disruptive kids and the ones that are aren’t that disruptive."
Swan on X - "my teacher friends tell me that the opposite is occurring and that in fact they are not allowed to discipline the disruptive for diversity reasons."
Kalle Mikkola on X - "In Finland, we did that. Then we had the best-educated kids in the world. After we stopped doing that, we fell from 1st to 20th or so."

Meme - "Why do I have to be fucked in the ass by an octopus?"
hentai artists: *shocked*
"Tsundere Inran Shoujo Sukumi Episode 1 at 13:26"

Meme - "There is no terrorism in Islam. It is all Western Intelligence. Incidentally, here is a children's religion book from the Middle East. *warriors with swords, beheadings and severed heads*"

Meme - "NOW SHE KNOWS HOW I FEEL... WHEN SHE IS SHOPPING FOR CLOTHES *woman sitting in aisle of DIY/home improvement store*"

Meme - "Gay test. If you see spider-man, I've got bad news for you!"

Meme - "Let's learn the differences between chubby, curvy, fat, and hambeast.
CHUBBY. Chubby girls tend to be rounder all around, but still tend to look more on the average side. Unlike curvy. which has a thin waist. chubby girls lack the same amount of definition that a curvy girl does, but still maintains a semi-curvy figure. Chubby girls may or may not have rolls, most of the time will have larger boobs and butt.
CURVY. Most of the fat stored in a curvy girl is in the breasts and her hips/ass. Curvy girls tend to be thin mostly everywhere else, thing arms, face, waist. These giris tend to be toned and well defined.
FAT. Fat is a level higher than chubby, when excess rolls on the body begin to form. Fat girls tend to have very large boobs and very large butts.
HAMBEAST. Hambeast is exceeding the limit on the definition of "fat". Unlike the other three, hambeasts are generally catergorized for their lack of shape and hygiene. Due to this lack of hygiene and shape, hambeasts are said to be monstrous and horrifying creatures. The only thing that seperates fat and hambeast is apperance and personality."

Meme - "Girls with time machine:
I'm your grandaughter
Omg Really?
Boys with time machine:
*To A&W* Okay so if you want to compete with McDonalds in America you'll want to come out with a 1/5 pound burger because 5 is bigger then 4"

Meme - "Why everyone wanna be your friend as soon as you pull these out in class *Apple EarPods, chewing gum, Takis, pistol*"

Jon and Carie Hallford plead guilty to corpse abuse charges: Reports - "The Colorado funeral home owners that had nearly 200 decomposing bodies at their facility pleaded guilty... A further investigation revealed that about 190 bodies, which were in various states of decomposition, had been stored in the building, according to authorities.    "Some of the remains discovered had dates of death as far back as 2019," the U.S. Attorney's Office said in an October news release. "As part of their fraud scheme, the Hallfords misled customers of the funeral home into believing that the remains of their loved ones would be buried or cremated per their wishes and the terms of the parties’ contracts." The family-owned and operated funeral home advertised that they performed "green" natural burials without embalming chemicals or metal caskets. Prosecutors said the Hallfords defrauded families across the country by "not providing a cremation or burial for the deceased as promised."   According to prosecutors, the Hallfords allegedly gave families dry concrete instead of ashes, collected more than $130,000 from families for cremations and burials they never performed. In addition, the Hallfords allegedly buried the wrong body on at least two occasions."

Tulsi Gabbard Criticizes Harris, Then Suddenly - TSA 'Retaliation' - "“This is a clear act of political retaliation. There is no other way to put it,” that’s how former Democrat presidential candidate and Lieutenant Colonel Tulsi Gabbard describes her placement on a Transportation Security Administration threat list – just a day after she criticized Kamala Harris on a Fox News Program.  Multiple Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward to claim that Gabbard had been enrolled in TSA’s Quiet Skies program on July 23, a day after she criticized Harris on-air...   Reports claim at least five agents and two explosive detection canine teams were following Gabbard and her husband last month."

Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul Placed on List of Russian Propagandists by Ukraine - Newsweek - "Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard have been listed by Ukraine among a number of American politicians, academics and activists Kyiv claims have promoted "Russian propaganda."  The list was compiled by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, founded in 2021 by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to study the impact of Russian disinformation. The center is part of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council.  The list—which also includes retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, military strategist Edward Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and journalist Glenn Greenwald—does not explain what the consequences are for those who Ukraine clearly considers responsible for promoting the Kremlin's line. But it offers explanations for inclusion on the list... "I am surprised that the blacklist did not include the Pope, Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, Stephen Walt, Barry Posen, and other prominent figures who have made arguments similar to mine and others already on the list," Mearsheimer told Newsweek.  Luttwak also objected to the label of Russian propagandist. Talking to UnHerd, he said he was not "exactly Putin's most faithful agent," saying he has argued for Western powers to send weapons to Ukraine since "day one of the war."... As well as U.S. citizens, the list of "Russian propagandists" includes political figures, experts and public figures from Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Poland and France.  Other Americans on the list are: political and business advisor Harlan Ullman, author Paul Pillar, economists Jeffrey Sachs and Steve Hanke, political analyst Brian Berletic, academics Patrick Basham and Clifford Kiracofe, former army officer David Payne, ex-diplomat Michael Springmann, retired intelligence officer Scott Ritter, finance specialist Jason Ross, businessman Mike Callicrate, politicians Geoff Young and Diane Sare, journalists Caleb Maupin and Tony Magliano, retired business consultant George Koo, Republican former Senate staffer Jim Jatras, former CIA officer Ray McGovern, former Virginia State Senator Richard Black and political analyst Graham Fuller."
Only Ukrainian propaganda is alright

Meme - Alien 1979: "almost perfect, i just wish there was more than just the one alien in it"
Aliens 1986: "holy hell"

Why has badminton become a code for sex in Hong Kong? - "It may be an innocent enough racquet sport, but Hong Kong's Education Bureau has unintentionally given badminton a whole new meaning.  In teaching materials it released last week, a module titled adolescents and intimate relationships for Secondary Year 3, suggested that teenagers who wanted to have sex with each other could "go out to play badminton together" instead.  The materials also include a form called "My Commitment" aimed at getting "young lovers" to attest that they would exercise "self-discipline, self-control, and resistance to pornography".  The new materials have raised eyebrows and attracted criticism for being "out of touch". But officials have defended the decision.  Meanwhile social media has been flooded with jokes centered around "playing badminton"... To Thomas Tang, who is an amateur badminton player, the jokes and sudden increased interest in the sport have made it slightly embarrassing for players like him.  "In the past this was just a healthy sport, but now if you ask people to play badminton they make a lot of jokes," he said, adding that the irony was that badminton was actually a good way for guys to meet girls.  The Education Bureau documents also told teachers that one of the objectives of the module was to help students master ways of coping with sexual fantasies and impulses, and the module was not created to encourage them to start dating or engaging in sexual behaviour. Some suggested discussion activities in the documents include advising students to "dress appropriately to present a healthy image and to avoid visual stimulation from sexy clothing", and "firmly refuse sex before marriage" if they are unable to cope with the "consequences of premarital sex"."

Meme - "POV: You found out Japan has grocery stores with no cashiers and no security so now all your groceries are free *black guy with covered face*"

The Disgusting Truth About Mao Zedong's Personal Hygiene - "the man was chronically constipated. As Ludwig describes, the chairman's bodyguards were "trained not only to protect him against enemies but also to give him enemas if they failed" at prying the stubborn poop from his butt with their fingers first.   Even Mao's poops were regarded as special occasions. At the end of a nine-day bout of constipation his employees rejoiced, "The chairman's bowels have moved!" Having to unclog a dictators butt by hand must have been horrific enough. But it must have been especially horrendous in Mao's case because he had the personal hygiene of a garbage dump... The doctor revealed that the dictator never brushed his teeth, which turned green. His infected gums gushed pus. When encouraged to brush his not-at-all pearly greens, Mao growled, "Does a tiger brush his teeth?" The chairman preferred to rinse his mouth with tea and chew leaves like peasants did. He seemed to revel in his grossness As detailed in King of the Mountain, Mao once reached into his pants "to pick lice off his body deliberately" while being interviewed by a female reporter. He also considered bathing "a waste of time." And since Mao already spent much of his precious time expelling waste due to constipation, it comes as no surprise that he only occasionally gave people's nostrils a reprieve when he went for a swim and toweled off. Li blamed the chairman's deep-seated opposition to soap and water on a "three-bath philosophy" that Chinese peasants allegedly adopted: "A bath at birth, one before marriage and one at death." However, the Independent mentions one other exception that appears in Li's tell-all. The congenitally filthy dictator claimed to clean his genitals by showering himself with women. Or as the chairman crudely put it, "I wash myself in the bodies of my women." To make matters more revolting, Chairman Lice Crotch reportedly rivaled China's Yellow Emperor, who allegedly "deflower[ed] 1,000 virgins." In exchange for taking them to bed, he gave some of them a "minor venereal disease." Li urged him to take medication so that his partners didn't keep getting the short end of Mao's disease-infested stick. But true to form, the chairman acted like a massive dictator, dismissively insisting, "If it doesn't bother me, it doesn't matter." And since Mao didn't exhibit symptoms, it didn't bother him. One of the giant ironies of Mao's reign is that he waged a major campaign that promoted peasant hygiene, improved sanitation, and reduced STDs. Per the Journal of Global Health, the communicable disease control (CDC) implemented under Mao led to a huge boost in life expectancy and dramatic drops in infant mortality, STDS, and other maladies. NPR reports that he remedied a shortage of competent doctors by organizing a system of so-called "barefoot doctors" who had basic medical training and augmented their knowledge with a rigorous three-to-six-month crash course. These insta-physicians were dispersed to villages."

Gay men discriminate against feminine gay men, new study finds - "Psychology study finds both gay men and heterosexual men prefer masculine over feminine gay men for a high-status role, suggesting feminine gay men may face implicit discrimination in the workplace."

The Kansas Budget Experience from 2012 to 2017. - "In 2012, Kansas was the first state to eliminate pass-through business income taxes for LLCs, partnerships, and S-corporations. It also lowered the personal income tax rate in its 2012 and 2013 legislative sessions. Proponents of the tax cuts argued that they would stimulate the economy by creating jobs at a higher than historical rate and would thus have a minimal effect on the budget. This research documents when legislators began discussing the tax cut proposals through the repeal of the tax cuts. The consequences of the tax cuts was a significant decline in income tax that led to a structural deficit in the Kansas budget. The defi cit necessitated an extended series of diffi cult choices for legislators on how to balance the budget. The tax cuts also led to credit downgrades, increasing debt, and a series of lawsuits over court funding of K-12 schools, among other problems. Studying the Kansas experience is important because several states and the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 followed this model of tax cuts."

The Short-term Effects of the Kansas Income Tax Cuts on Employment Growth - "The state of Kansas made dramatic changes to the structure of its personal income tax by eliminating taxation of business income and lowering marginal tax rates on other personal income sources. Proponents of the legislation maintain that the tax reductions will stimulate employment growth. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we estimate the impact of the tax changes on private-sector employment in the state of Kansas, relative to its border states, using data on the number of establishment employees and proprietors. We apply multistate county fixed effect model and county-border matching approaches to identify tax effects. Our findings indicate that two years post enactment, the tax law changes have not yielded a net increase in private-sector employment."

Nestflix - "The platform for your favorite nested films and shows.  Fictional movies within movies? Got ‘em. Fake shows within shows? You bet. Browse our selection of over 800 stories within stories."

Meme - "I went to Haiti and was served stewed cat. I can confirm the meat is really delicious. (NSF cat lovers)"
"While I was in Haiti, it was really awesome to always see kittens running around the villages I visited. After about a week though, I got curious and asked someone who had been there for over a year, "so, where are all the like... adult cats?" "Oh, they get eaten." Nice."

Meme - Hide the Pain Harold: "I am a meme not an influencer"

How to Live for Free in Beijing: An Artist’s Guide - "Like many art students, Zou Yaqi often worried she’d be unable to afford to live in Beijing after graduation. So, earlier this year, she decided to set herself a daunting challenge: Survive in the city for three weeks without spending a single yuan.  It turned out to be a piece of cake.   The 23-year-old spent most of May living the high life: gorging on buffets in VIP lounges, sipping wine at exclusive events, and sleeping on plush sofas in the lobbies of five-star hotels. She ended up sticking to her zero-yuan budget with ease. The secrets to her success? A fake HermĂšs handbag, bright red lipstick, and a velour designer tracksuit — all of which helped Zou pose as a member of China’s wealthy social elite. She found that when she was disguised as a mingyuan —  or “socialite” — businesses would let her exploit their hospitality without question... authorities vowed to “adjust” excessively high incomes and force the rich to “give back to society.”... While Zou said her stunt was intended as a criticism of capitalism and consumerism, many critics have accused her of being unaware of her own privilege. Her experiences as a student at one of China’s elite arts colleges, the theory goes, allowed her to pass as a socialite with ease.   “What enables her to accomplish her performance art is precisely her class,” wrote one user on Weibo. “Everything — her makeup, choice of props, successful repartee in each place, and the individual image she presented — come from the invisible accumulation (of cultural capital) prior to the experiment.”... After she began studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, this feeling grew. Zou says she became increasingly fascinated by the excess on display at the campus. During exhibition openings, hungry students like herself would “madly” eat the caviar-topped canapes on offer, while other well-heeled visitors ignored them.  â€œThose elegant people barely ate them, and they’d go to waste,” Zou says. “We were stuffing ourselves till we were full, like we were at a free buffet.”  Zou coined a term to describe this phenomenon: “excessive goods.” An “excessive good” could be anything that is given to the wealthy for free, but is inaccessible to the non-wealthy. A complimentary snack at a swanky bar. A free gift at a luxury store. A bottle of wine at an invitation-only dinner. To Zou, these “excessive goods” were a potent symbol of the wealth gap. They were seemingly everywhere, yet the capital’s high-rollers barely noticed them. Often, they ended up being thrown away... “I’m more cautious and casual in daily life, but I had to present an elegant, haughty, and self-confident image,” says Zou... Zou was caught off-guard when the story began to focus on her own background, and social media commenters started to describe her as a mingyuan in a different — and much less pleasant — sense.    The word mingyuan has become ubiquitous in Chinese media in recent months, and the meaning of the word has begun to morph. No longer simply a term to describe true socialites, it has acquired classist and sexist connotations. Increasingly, it’s used as a derogatory term to describe women who flaunt fake wealth in order to get attention."

Opinion: TD Bank’s ‘LOL’ culture reverses two generations of southward expansion - The Globe and Mail - "The most striking thing about U.S. Attorney-General Merrick Garland’s takedown of Toronto-Dominion Bank TD-T on Thursday wasn’t the criminal conviction, the massive US$3.09-billion in penalties or the freeze on future growth in the U.S. market.  The shocking element of Mr. Garland’s press-conference critique was the TD employee e-mails he read aloud... Time after time, year after year, TD branch staff, managers and compliance officials joked about laundering money for drug dealers. In three separate e-mails that Mr. Garland read aloud at the press conference, TD employees’ reaction to suspicious activity, such as customers dropping off $1-million in cash and withdrawing the same day in cheques, was to send a note ending with LOL – laugh out loud – to colleagues.  â€œIn one instance a compliance employee asked a manager what ‘the bad guys’ thought about the bank. The manager replied: ‘Lol. Easy target,’ ” Mr. Garland said.  When bankers consistently tack “LOL” to e-mails and texts about working with criminals, there is a serious problem... Going forward, 97,000 TD employees will understand dropping LOL into an internal e-mail is a career-ending move."

Meme - *Venn diagram*
China and Japan: hate South Korea
China and South Korea: hate Japan
Japan and South Korea: hate China
All three: addicted to anime"

Commentary: Don’t dismiss the fury over Fukushima’s water - "Japan of all countries should be empathetic in dealing with the sometimes irrational opposition that nuclear energy can generate.  For decades, US nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers visiting local ports had to give authorities 24 hours’ notice so that geiger checks could be carried out - despite more than 1,000 dockings passing without incident.   A 20-minute unapproved arrival in 2001 prompted the country’s foreign minister to temporarily call off such visits. In the 1960s, even agreed visits often prompted thousands of demonstrators to turn out.  That unique political environment is inseparable from the fact that Japan is the only nation that has had atomic weapons used against it. You would have expected the nation that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a little accommodating of local sentiments on this issue.   Even so, the US’ observance of the radiological theatre around ship visits was a potent example that, in diplomacy, listening and pragmatism are usually more important than being right...   As recently as 2015, then-prime minister Shinzo Abe told a delegation of island leaders meeting some 40km from the Fukushima plant “to support Japan's effort without being misled by rumours”.  That sort of scolding response was thankfully absent in his successor Fumio Kishida’s summit on the sidelines of the Group of Seven meeting earlier this month with Prime Minister Mark Brown of the Cook Islands. Pacific leaders, in turn, appear to have been mollified by the greater transparency and dialogue.   There’s a lesson here for nuclear advocates, too. It’s common now for supporters of an enhanced role for nuclear energy to dismiss the safety regulation around atomic plants as an unnecessary and costly imposition that must be swept away, sparking a renaissance of atomic power.   That’s an unrealistic and ultimately counterproductive ambition. Every form of major infrastructure has to deal with public opinion, and in a democracy you don’t get to rule whether your opponents’ arguments are valid enough.   That’s a problem for renewables as much as nuclear. Europe closed nine factories for wind turbine parts between 2018 and 2022, according to Bloomberg, as demand slumped in a region that has effectively outlawed onshore wind farms from swathes of its territory."
There is an interesting parallel here with "misinformation" and other things the left hates

Meme - "Got a new quilt cover with sequins on, me and the Mrs leave each other romantic messages #love #romantic"
"fancy a shag" "no fuck off"

Fury as council worker removes chocolate eggs left for park Easter hunt - "A council worker confiscated chocolate eggs hidden for children to find.  A “kind-hearted” resident hid 30 eggs in parks around Melksham, Wilts, for children on Easter Sunday.  But the hunt was ruined when a “jobsworth” from the town council seized the chocolate eggs – some of which also had ÂŁ20 notes inside – because of health and safety fears... “I had two eggs and he told me I couldn’t keep them because they weren’t safe. I replied that it was really about the money inside them. He claimed he didn’t know any had money in them so I just handed them over, called him a jobsworth and walked away.”  The council has now apologised and said it had returned the eggs to where they had been taken... “I understand that over 30 eggs were removed from various park locations around Melksham this morning. This action was taken on health and safety grounds as our operatives were concerned the eggs might not be safe to eat."
Damn right wing media trying to remove worker protections!

The Terrorist Propaganda to Reddit Pipeline

With Reddit being used for LLM (artificial intelligence) training, this also explains why AI models have a left wing bias. And Reddit's selective moderation (primarily banning non-left wing users/subreddits for imaginary offences while letting left wing ones do much worse, with an example below of promoting a terrorist supporter to top mod over much older ones) is how it ensures overall bias on the site:

The Terrorist Propaganda to Reddit Pipeline

"It’s by now a truism that digital propaganda will play a central role in wars of the 21st century. What’s less understood is the extent to which this is already happening. Amid the din about TikTok’s ties to Beijing, little attention is paid to terror groups funded by Iran and Qatar that are linked to extraordinarily effective propaganda networks that span every major social media and information platform.

Since October 7, an online network has emerged that directs content sourced from US-designated Islamist terror organizations — including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthi movement — across Reddit, Discord, X, TikTok, Instagram, Quora and Wikipedia. The network works with an awareness that its manipulation eventually flows downstream and gets baked into universal platforms like Google search and ChatGPT.

The central locus of the network is a 270,000-member subreddit called r/Palestine. A Discord server with the same name functions as command-and-control for the r/Palestine network, and is promoted prominently on the subreddit. On the Discord — whose new members must undergo an ideological purity test consisting of questions about their views on Israel, Zionism and October 7 — a “Reddit task force” channel coordinates posting to Reddit, identifying “comments sections that need more pro Palestinian commentary,” mass upvoting of anti-Israel posts, and downvoting of pro-Israel posts (a practice known as “vote brigading”). The Discord has separate task forces for Quora, TikTok, Instagram, X, and Wikipedia.

On Reddit, the network consists of no fewer than 110 subreddits controlled by around 30 core moderators who are part of the network. Its central subreddits — including r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and r/ApartheidIsrael — are topically relevant and built around overlapping ideologies that include anti-Zionism, anti-capitalism, radical Marxism, Islamism, and anti-Western and pro-Iranian-regime sentiment. Other core subreddits in the network include r/Panarab, r/fight_disinformation, r/Global_News_Hub and r/suppressed_news.

But it’s with a cluster of million-member-strong subreddits infiltrated and now controlled by the network that have nothing to do with the Mideast — or even politics generally — that the r/Palestine network is particularly effective, and which illustrates an extraordinary degree of unambiguous astroturfing meant to convince unsuspecting users that there’s a widespread anti-Israel, anti-Western, Marxist movement online. These include, but aren’t limited to: r/Documentaries (20 million members), r/therewasanattempt (7.2 million), r/PublicFreakout (4.7 million), r/Fauxmoi (4.3 million), and r/iamatotalpieceofshit (2.1 million).

The network leverages command-and-control mechanisms, radicalizing messaging and decentralized tactics by exploiting the openness and freedom afforded by these platforms, as well as vulnerabilities in the platforms’ trust and safety operation, which have largely been outsourced to the user-base itself (rather than trained moderators).

But they also use Reddit and Wikipedia’s unique status in relation to search engines and LLMs to spread the propaganda orders of magnitude further.

Last year, Reddit and Google signed a $60 million content licensing deal giving Google access to Reddit’s API for LLM training and search purposes...

A similar phenomenon is at work on search engines, namely Google, which frequently ranks Reddit posts as the first results on topic searches — something the r/Palestine network has reverse engineered to its benefit. For example, if you Google “hostages collage” (in reference to a grid of photos of Israeli hostages held by Hamas), a top result — when we viewed them, it was placed above a page from the Hostages and Missing Families forum where users can download the collage — is a r/Palestine post: “Has anyone noticed the duplicate images in the hostages collage shown by Israel at the ICJ?” Google prominently features misinformation from other platforms, too. Information from Wikipedia can be found at the top of billions of searches per year, despite its articles being heavily poisoned by bad actors. And YouTube frequently uses Wikipedia as the ground truth for “topical context” it provides for “videos related to topics prone to misinformation,” despite the ability for those articles to be manipulated and affect users in real time.

This on its own is highly problematic, though could be reasonably dismissed as an unintended consequence of legitimate free expression and the benign mechanics of LLM training and search algorithms. What changes the equation, however, is that, at its core, the network is dedicated to covertly spreading propaganda distributed by US-designated terror groups. And this is exactly what the r/Palestine network often does: it sources the content it puts on Reddit (and then vote brigades) from propaganda aggregators like Resistance News Network (RNN).

Screenshots I obtained seem to indicate that RNN pulls content from a color-coded list of Telegram channels run by US-designated foreign terror organizations headquartered across the Middle East. Many of these channels aren’t available in the US due to restrictions on terror-related content, so RNN’s translation and re-posting of the content represents an effective — if illegal — workaround of US terror law.

While not the sole distributor of content produced by foreign terror groups, RNN is the main one. It aggregates and distributes content from US-designated groups in Israel-Palestine, including Hamas, the group that launched the October 7 attacks, during which its militants deliberately killed children, and for which Human Rights Watch accused it of war crimes; Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which participated in the October 7 attacks alongside Hamas and is known for its indiscriminate rocket fire targeting civilian areas in Israel; Martyr Abu Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which also participated in the October 7 attacks; and many more. In Iraq, RNN pulls from around a dozen channels, including Kataeb Hezbollah, which has engaged in a sustained campaign of rocket and drone attacks against US bases and assets in the region, and Scream of Al-Quds Brigades, which is part of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. In Yemen, RNN aggregates at least six channels of major terror groups, including the Houthis...

RNN has a particularly tight relationship with Samidoun, which the US government classifies as a terror entity, with the Treasury Department calling it a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the PFLP” (Khaled Barakat, a PFLP senior leader, co-founded Samidoun in 2011). After RNN’s Telegram was banned in the EU last August, Samidoun was instrumental in helping them reconstitute, publishing statements on behalf of RNN and directing users to the group’s mirror channel. Samidoun’s efforts to revive RNN after the ban reveal the extent to which it is connected to — and perhaps reliant on — RNN.

On Reddit, terror group propaganda aggregated by RNN is able to tunnel under the walled gardens of Telegram and into the groundwater of public debate. In one case, a user in r/israelexposed (68,000 members), a subreddit controlled by the r/Palestine network, posted a quote about the alleged detention of a Palestinian boy under the title “Israeli soldiers abduct and beat children.” The post was a direct quote from RNN, which was cited as the source. The same text and video were also posted in r/IsraelCrimes (54,000 members), also controlled by the network. While the content of the clip can be interpreted in different ways, the post is one of many examples of how the r/Palestine network funnels content from RNN onto Reddit.

In the r/TrueAnon subreddit (60,000 members), also controlled by the group, a user posted a screen grab of a message from the head of the Houthis posted in the group’s Telegram channel: “I call on America to send more MQ9 drones, as Yemeni air defenses enjoy grilling them.” The same account previously posted a “Guide to Palestine Resistance groups posted by RNN,” which featured a screen grab of an explainer on Hamas’ Al-Qassam brigades, which led the October 7 atrocities, broken down into sections: “Who are they?”, “Notable figures,” “Where are they most active” and their “Arsenal.” The last line of the post, taken directly from RNN, reads, “Together, we are united until liberation.”

The activity coordinated by the network is not restricted to posting content online. In fact, the network frequently promotes demonstrations and rallies organized by US-designated terror groups on Reddit. In December, after Samidoun was designated a terror entity, an account tied to the network posted an image from a rally organized by Samidoun in Brazil with the title “Free Palestine!” and the caption “Today in São Paulo BR.” A post like this would normally be an unambiguous example of free expression if it weren’t for the fact that Samidoun is a front organization for the PFLP designed to fundraise from a Western audience. In another example, one of the network’s highly influential moderators, u/Sabbah, directly sources Samidoun content about a demonstration it organized in New York City in a r/Palestine post.

The promotion of content from foreign terror organizations on Reddit, including by top moderators, raises serious legal concerns. U.S. “material support” laws prohibit aiding terror entities, including spreading propaganda, training guides, or recruitment tools — forms of speech not protected by the First Amendment. (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act also does not shield platforms from criminal liability in such cases.)

This poses a major risk for Reddit. Despite this, sources with direct knowledge told me Reddit’s trust and safety executives have repeatedly failed to address the issue adequately, even though they’re aware of it. These sources told me that dozens of attempts to alert the company about the pipeline were systematically ignored and sidelined. On one occasion, I was told, Reddit senior trust and safety team members — including the VP of Data Science and Safety — openly laughed at issues they raised.

The backbone of the r/Palestine network is a group of moderators who control dozens of overlapping subreddits, with r/Palestine as the central hub. These users co-moderate the core group of ideological subreddits, like r/IsraelCrimes, r/palestinenews, and r/ApartheidIsrael, where the content is dedicated to intensive and sustained anti-Israel messaging.

The moderator network is key, since Reddit mods hold sweeping authority over their communities, with the ability to remove posts, ban users, dictate discussion rules, and control visibility through pinned posts and automated filters. They can shape narratives by approving or suppressing content, restricting participation with account age and karma requirements, and even preemptively censoring topics using Automoderator.

Much of the network’s influence lies in popular subreddits that, nominally, have nothing to do with Israel. For example, u/Sabbah, the highly influential member of the network mentioned previously, moderates topically relevant subreddits like r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, r/Palestinians, r/palestinenews, r/ApartheidIsrael, and r/Panarab. However, Sabbah also moderates r/Documentaries, r/therewasanattempt, r/PublicFreakout, r/IRLEasterEggs, r/ToiletPaperUSA, r/Thatsactuallyverycool and r/boringdystopia — a cluster of unrelated, large subreddits that have been captured by the network.

The network includes moderators like BlueberryBubblyBuzz (who also operates another account in the network called Kumquat_conniption), ohhyouknow, PlenitudeOpulence, Falafel1998, _makoccino_, and dozens of others, many of whom also moderate the r/Palestine Discord server. Clustering together as mods gives the group effective control over some of the biggest subreddits on the site. As of the time of this writing:

  • On r/therewasanattempt (7.2 million members), Sabbah, Kumpquat_conniption, ohhyouknow, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and usernameoverloaded are some of the most active human (i.e. non-bot) moderators.
  • r/PublicFreakout (4.7 million members) is moderated by Sabbah, --intifada--, PlenitudeOpulence, ohhyouknow, Kumquat_conniption, and BlueberryBubblyBuzz. The former two have what amounts to admin privileges (their permission level is “everything”).
  • On r/MorbidReality (1.1 million members), Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and ohhyouknow make up the majority of the subreddit’s human moderators.
  • r/ToiletPaperUSA (440,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, and BlueberryBubblyBuzz, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges.
  • r/Thatsactuallyverycool (277,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumpquat_conniption, BlueBerryBubblyBuzz, Falafel1998, and PlenitudeOpulence, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges
  • On r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM (184,000 members), Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and Falafel1998, are moderators, all of whose permission level is “everything.”
  • r/boringdystopia (94,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, _makoccino_, Falafel1988, ohhyouknow, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges.

r/therewasanattempt, a subreddit originally meant for funny ‘fail’ content, and which has over 7 million members, features as its main banner an archery target in the colors of the Palestinian flag with the words “Free Palestine” ringed around it and Israel in the bull’s eye. (The subreddit’s icon is this same target with the Israel bull’s eye.) The main banner previously featured the phrase “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be Free.” The subreddit’s sidebar recommends network-controlled r/Palestine, r/PublicFreakout, r/boringdystopia, and several more.

The sheer volume of posts in r/therewasanattempt obscures a steady tempo of anti-Israel content. For example, a recent post’s caption was “[there was an attempt] to support Palestine” featuring a video of the protestor who rushed the field with a Palestinian flag during the last Super Bowl halftime show captioned, “Fearless Protester Charges Field Waving Palestinian Flag During Super Bowl Half-Time Show.” Two days before, there was a post featuring the caption, “[there was an attempt] To appear as the world’s most powerfull [sic] country” showing an image of Trump pulling out a chair for Netanyahu. One day prior came a post with the caption “[there was an attempt] To argue that opposing ethnic cleansing makes you antisemitic.”

The extent to which other network-controlled subreddits are so obviously astroturfed would be hilarious if moderators weren’t using them to distribute propaganda made by terrorists. A mod announcement titled “We’re a pro-Palestine, leftist subreddit!” is pinned to the top of r/ToiletPaperUSA; every other post on r/PublicFreakout is protest footage; the pinned post on r/boringdystopia is a list of ways to donate to Palestine (which includes a link to r/Palestine’s fundraising page), and its recommended subreddits include r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and other network-controlled subreddits.

One of the biggest non-relevant subreddits controlled by the network — and one that, at 20 million members, is among the most popular subreddits on the site — is r/Documentaries. Co-moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, Falafel1998, ohhyouknow, PlenitudeOpulence and another member of the network, PalRep, the subreddit is dominated by the r/Palestine network, its members constituting eight out of the subreddit’s 14 non-bot moderators.

A glance at r/Documentaries content shows what you’d suppose: links to documentaries, mainly on YouTube. Woven into these videos, however, is a steady through-line of anti-Israel or pro-Palestine propaganda on a cycle that separates them by mere days — in some cases, no more than a single day. No other topic or theme on r/Documentaries receives this persistent and intensive focus...

Given the prominence of Israel/Gaza in the news, you might think the content on r/Documentaries is organic. But this is not the case. Sabbah — one of the primary moderators of r/Palestine subreddit, Discord server and multiple nodes in the network — brigades upvotes for posts featuring anti-Israel videos to ensure these posts end up positioned prominently.

And that the six subreddits recommended by r/Documentaries are exclusively controlled by the network also suggests blatant astroturfing, and effectively makes r/Documentaries the top of a multi-step funnel that sends users into ever more topical network subreddits, each of which contains successively more terrorist-sourced propaganda.

r/Documentaries recommends the slightly smaller r/therewasanattempt →
r/therewasanattempt recommends r/BoringDystopia (and r/Palestine) →
r/BoringDystopia recommends both r/Palestine and r/palestinenews, and so on

Generally, the pattern plays out across all the network’s subreddits: subreddits with massive membership funnel users to — and supercharge the growth of — a stepladder of ever more extreme subreddits, always leading back to one of the group’s core subreddits like r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and others.

Sabbah — and other key moderators who belong to the r/Palestine propaganda network — was the first member of the network to join r/Documentaries, in the weeks after October 7 in his case. Ohhyouknow, Kumquat_conniption, and PlenitudeOpulence joined four days later. The other r/Palestine network members joined in the subsequent weeks and months. The only moderators of r/Documentaries who are not members of the r/Palestine network joined between 2015 and 2016.

Despite having nearly a decade less seniority in r/Documentaries than the previously existing moderators, Sabbah was made the subreddit’s top mod (the first listed in the moderator side panel). This gives him a raft of powers, including the ability to remove every other moderator from the subreddit.

This network extends far beyond Reddit. Key members serve as ligatures connecting the network’s activities on Reddit, X, Discord and Quora...

The r/Palestine network is not only succeeding but growing rapidly. The pipeline it operates carrying propaganda from terror organizations into the open sea of the Internet suggests that very little about the network is organic. That, rather, is part of the illusion of a groundswell of popular sentiment that just happens to think and speak about this issue in a given way.

Good propaganda has varying objectives and standards. In some cases, it’s to sow just enough doubt to create a wedge. In other cases, the aim is to cajole or convince, or intimidate opposition into silence. What’s unique to r/Palestine is that it’s likely the first major propaganda effort that brings to bear the full range of digital platforms and capabilities, from messaging apps like Telegram to the forum modality of Reddit, the group discussion of Discord, and amplification of ancillary networks like X and Quora.

The truth is that the network is doing what propaganda is designed to do — influence masses of people without them knowing. Its success in camouflaging the network is evidenced by the fact that Reddit continues to deny this is an issue. But that only makes it more effective, giving it a freedom to maneuver that propagandists of yesteryear could have only dreamt of. 

While there may be some top-down control somewhere much further up the food chain, the network successfully merges deliberate control with an ability to commandeer existing networks. It’s a symbiotic approach that hijacks the democratic dynamics embedded in spaces where speech and expression are open and free — all performed in service of radical ideologies that seek nothing more than totalitarian control of how we think and what we think about."

Links - 1st July 2025 (1 - Trans Mania)

Meme - Leanne: "Having access to healthcare for trans people is also very important, which China and Thailand do a much better job at than the West"
Readers added context: "Transgender health care in China is severely lacking in resources and social acceptance:"

Meme - MaryCate Delvey @marycatedelvey: "Jail for all men who involve INFANTS in their disgusting womanface f3tishes"
"THE QUEER ISSUE
My First Time Breastfeeding My Daughter
Breastfeeding is freaky. Not the sucking bit. You're reading The Stranger, so odds are you've had a titty sucked at some point in your life. No, it's because when my baby attached to my breast, there was an incredible chemical cascade that ran through my entire body like lightning. Imagine the most electric thing a partner has ever done to you, then multiply it by 10. I could feel my brain rewiring, creating pathways that would permanently connect me to my child (And yeah, I kind of got off on it. Don't judge.)"
Venice allan @roseveniceallan: "Never mind the dolls, PROTECT THE BABIES" *MTF breastfeeding*

Kimberly Klacik on X - "Why aren’t kids in the hood transitioning to the opposite sex? I know the answer, just wanted to see if you knew. Comment below
"
Sara Higdon on X - "Well because the typical demographic is upper middle class white kids of progressive parents. for two reasons. They have time and money to worry about such things, and have been conditioned to believe through Critical Theory that they are an oppressor and there is no way they can ever escape that status, so they see this as a way to join an oppressed class for which they are celebrated for instead of condemned. It’s the relationship between CRT and Queer theory."

Transgenders in the Military? Please stop the Hyperbole - It's Not About Equality. - "In the past, the US military had one purpose: To defend our nation. The individual voluntarily succumbed to the greater national good. If the individual benefitted, it was secondary to the cause of the nation. Now, certain individuals have eclipsed the purpose for serving, and the military has assumed a secondary role of some cultural touchstone whereby serving is an individual right.  Why should someone be allowed to enlist, knowing that the enlistment will entail medical costs due to mental health management, hormone treatments, and other procedures up to and including gender reassignment surgery – not to mention the lost work productivity for all of the above? Why is that fair to the millions of others who wish to serve who also have a medical condition? Or even a non-medical condition, such as being a single parent or having a wrong tattoo? Why is it fair to allow a transgender to enlist – knowing the medical costs on the other side from the time of enlistment – when someone with high blood pressure cannot? That’s treatable. If he or she is otherwise fit to serve, why not enlist him or her, and begin treatment?  In an extreme example, why not let someone in with cancer? Why couldn’t John McCain, in an earlier life, have shown up to Annapolis with a brain tumor? After all, in hindsight, we know what he’s capable of. Why not treat it, and let him serve? Going further, as the military is looking for the best and the brightest, what if Lance Armstrong had enlisted right after winning the Tour de France? He takes his entrance physical and finds he has testicular cancer. Why should that be disqualifying? We know on the face that he’s capable of serving. Let him in, treat the cancer, and let him serve. That’s hyperbole, of course, but it makes my point. There is no overwhelming reason to incur the costs of medical care for any individual, and because of it, the military has a cut-line of medical restrictions for enlistment. In the words of Spock – the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Unless, of course, you have a vocal lobby in congress. Then the military mission becomes secondary to an individual’s “right” to serve.  I hear a lot of talking heads saying “we need whoever can best serve. We’re cutting our recruitment base when we discriminate”, but that misses a banal truth: The military is built on medical discrimination, and that discrimination is based on its mission. There is a reason you don’t see any soldiers taking the oath of enlistment from a wheel chair, and it’s not because the military hates handicapped persons. It’s because the military is not a social construct. It is a war machine, and it is designed to close with and kill the enemy, period. There are hundreds of different medical conditions that prevent one from serving, and saying we’re losing out on recruits by banning transgender personnel is a red herring. Why not say the same about flat feet, like they did in 1941?...  emotion has taken sway over common sense. It is not the military’s job to create a position for the individual to self-actualize – especially if that self-actualization entails medical treatment at taxpayer expense. I feel for the transgender community, but no more than I do for the person with a hyperthyroid disorder or asthma. Neither can enter the military, but one has a political lobby that treats this as a civil rights issue. It is not.   Yes, there are transgender personnel who have served honorably while hiding their condition, just as there are thousands of soldiers who hide other medical conditions to serve, but that is not an argument to alter the enlistment standards. I know of a soldier who wanted to be a pilot, but found out he was color blind, which was a disqualifying condition for pilot training. He joined the Army instead of the Air Force, and then, after joining Special Forces, he learned that color blindness was also disqualifying for becoming a free-fall parachutist. He decided to hide it, ripping out any reference to colorblindness from his medical records and going to extraordinary lengths to pass the color vision tests over and over again. He succeeded for over a twenty-five year military career, but he would be the first to tell you that we shouldn’t drop color vision as a discriminator for HALO status. It’s there for a reason, as he discovered on a harrowing night jump.   The fact remains that gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and that diagnosis requires medical treatment the same as a host of other disqualifying medical ailments. A recent RAND study is routinely held up as showing that the medical costs incurred by transgender enlistments is negligible – a veritable drop in the bucket to the overall defense budget – and that may be true, but it’s also irrelevant. The same could be said of the majority of ailments currently proscribing one from serving. (Which also begs the question, if it’s so negligible, it’s proof that so few transgender are serving that the recruitment argument is meaningless. Why are we pole-vaulting over mouse turds for such a small minority?) Should we now simply drop all medical discriminators? Or is it just the LGBT community that gets the benefit? Why can’t someone with high cholesterol get in? Sure, they’re at risk for heart disease, but it’s treatable – and the cost would be negligible when compared to the overall defense budget. What about vision tests? A person disqualified from serving due to poor eyesight that could be fixed simply by a Lasik procedure? Why don’t we let all of them in, and give them the procedure – something that’s a hell of a lot cheaper than gender reassignment surgery? That, too, would be a drop in the bucket when compared to the overall defense budget, but do we really want the military to be in the business of fixing every problematic medical condition so that every single person who wishes to serve gets the ability to do so? Sooner or later, it’s no longer a drop in the bucket, and it’s a Pandora’s box that doesn’t need to be opened for the simple fact that it is unnecessary. A single day lost or a single dollar spent due to gender dysphoria is one too many, and it’s patently unfair to others who wish to serve but are denied that ability due to a medical condition outside of their control.  At the end of the day, we need to remember the mission of the military. The LGBT community has turned this into a crusade, but it doesn’t alter the facts. The military is not built to serve the individual, but the other way around. The individual serves the military – and by extension, the nation... The transgender community is estimated at 0.6 percent of the US population. The rate of disqualifying high blood pressure in the typical age for enlistment, per the American Heart Association, is 9 percent. Where is the outrage over the nine percent with hypertension? A completely treatable condition? Why does the fraction of a percentage of the transgender community have a cudgel to pound, as if that population somehow holds greater sway than the millions of others with treatable medical conditions?"

James Esses on X - "A concerned trainee therapist has leaked an advertisement for a student placement at the NHS Sussex Gender Service. Successful candidates must “understand gender diversity” and must be “affirming” and “anti-oppressive”. Dangerous ideology continues to infect the NHS."

James Esses on X - "A Green Party that doesn’t understand the basic and irrefutable science of biological reality cannot be trusted on the complex science of climate change."

Independent Women's Forum on X - "“Is there a biological difference between men & women?” -@RepLisaMcClain
“The answer is NO.”
WHAT⁉"

Meme - Gay Not Queer @Gaynotqueer1: "Some dads would much prefer to pretend that they have a straight daughter than a gay son."
LIEV SCHREIBER: ""Kai was always who Kai is" ...But I suppose the most profound moment was her asking us to change her pronouns. To be honest with you, it didn't feel like that big of a deal to me only because Kai had been so feminine for os long"

Meme - Sall Grover @salltweets: "“Men assault people in bathrooms” isn’t the argument to make when you want women to accept men in their bathrooms.  Why is this so hard to understand?"
Machine Pun Kelly @KellySc...: "Trans women don't want to invade women's bathrooms. They're just women who want to be able to pee. Over 50% of trans women are assaulted in the men's room EVERY YEAR. ACTUAL trans women assaulting women in the women's room doesn't even happen. Why is this so hard to understand?"
This never happens, of course.

Meme - pagliacci the hated 🌝 @Slatzism: "Copeland killed himself after he was outed as a secret crossdresser who had sick fantasies of "feminizing" little boys for sex and murdering women in his town.  Esquire does not mention this at all in their article and blames his suicide on “right wing media.”  won a Pulitzer."
Esquire @esquire: "It's an incredible honor to take home the @PulitzerPrizes  award in Feature Writing for Mark Warren's portrait of Bubba Copeland in our April/May 2024 issue.   Revisit the vital story:"
"Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy"
Readers added context: "The article that was awarded a Pulitzer prize trivializes the fact that former mayor "Bubba" Copeland used photos of women and children to create transgender fetish content, and even wrote a sexual fantasy about murdering a woman in order to steal her identity."

Meme - slsyckes:  "Yesterday a 69 year old man known as Robert his entire life walked out on a balcony and self identified as Leo. The entire world now calls him Leo without question. See how easy it is to accept and respect what an individual identifies as. Oh, and he was wearing a dress."
nycgingerguy: "No one's ever had a problem calling someone by a chosen name. A name is not an identity, however. "Hi. What's your name?" "I identify as Jim." You're trying to say the tradition of a man taking a name as Pope (which British Royalty do, also) is the same as choosing your own pronouns, something he's not doing. He also doesn't identify as The Pope. He actually is the Pope. Same difference as identifying as woman and actually being a woman. Lastly, a vestment is not a dress anymore than a wedding dress train is a rug."
I identify as The Pope. If you disagree, you're a bad person
When you think the left has hit peak stupidity, they outdo themselves

Meme - Michigan UNCENSORED Residents Group: Amelia Loupe: "If you're sooo deadset on stopping me, a trans woman, from using the women's restroom I hope you're also deadset on tasting the first round in my chamber Seconds, thirds, and even fourths are available if you really enjoy the first serving too! Bon appetit!"
Brianna Emirie: "Thank you for proving our point, women aren't safe with males in our spaces"

Meme - James Esses @JamesEsses: "Dear @carla_denyer ,  Could you kindly explain why you have compared the majority of the population, who believe in biological reality, to racists, anti-Semites, and male supremacists?"
Carla Denyer @carla_denyer: ""Overlaps can commonly be found between anti-gender [anti-trans] movements and: a) racist, anti-migrant, anti-Semitic, white nationalist, &/or pro-imperialism groups b) male supremacist, misogynistic, &/or men's rights groups" From @GATEOrg's report:"

Trans Community Feeling Unsafe Knowing There’s A Hockey Player Somewhere Out There Not Wearing A Pride Jersey | Babylon Bee - ""In order for us to feel safe, it's essential that every person on earth agree with our opinions and openly celebrate them in public at all times," said Trans Community Safety Liaison Bertha Glamqueen. "The knowledge that even one hockey player somewhere in the world is maybe not fully endorsing our beliefs is literal genocide." The distressing news comes after player Ivan Provorov refused to wear a shirt with rainbows on it and the NHL's Blackhawks announced they will not wear pride jerseys on pride night. Experts are warning this may cause trans people to die from being unsafe.  "What kind of fascist would let someone feel unsafe?" said Glamqueen as a 5-year-old stuffed a $20 in his G-string. "This groundswell of anti-LGBTQ hatred is absolutely terrifying."  At publishing time, the entire trans community had been led to feel even more unsafe after hearing that a guy named Steve from Peoria attends a non-queer-affirming church."

Being a man was too much hard work, so I became a woman: Inside the transmaxxing trend where men swap gender to get 'female' benefits like cheaper car insurance, free meals and sex - "if you were to believe everything you read on internet forums, modern-day womanhood can simply be defined by its perks.  They include cheaper car insurance, free meals and an all-round 'easier' life once you've bagged a 'high-value' man - i.e. someone who is wealthy and attractive, thereby making them 'deeply desirable'.  So it's perhaps unsurprising that men who fear they don't meet this criterion are growing increasingly envious of women's position in the dating sphere - and going to extreme lengths to achieve it.  Welcome to the world of transmaxxing: where 'low-value' males, who are struggling with their gender identity or former incels, are transitioning to females to cash in on on the benefits of womanhood.   The 'Transmaxxing Manifesto', which was written by the movement's anonymous Swedish leader Vintologi, outlines how one of the biggest advantages of becoming a woman is the 'superiority of female aesthetics' and how this can be used to 'extract resources from males'. On top of this, the document, which is readily available on transmaxxing forums, also highlights how the transition gives them 'access to female spaces' that are 'cleaner and generally more pleasant' - arguing that 'males are disgusting'...  'transmaxxer' Sammy appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Transmaxxer Life Uncovered - where she defined a man as 'dominant, successful, outgoing, confident and resilient'.  She then added that none of these stereotypical attributes could be used to describe her before her transition - as she went on to characterise her old life as 'slightly incel-esque' and 'isolated'... Since being on hormone replacement therapy, Sammy revealed she had been offered 'a lot' of free meals and drinks from men - and now has a steady boyfriend.   She added: 'I don’t want to spend 70 hours a week working or get a personal trainer to become a “true man”.'... transmaxxing has also become intertwined with the incel movement - as transitioning to a woman is deemed preferable to being a 'low value' man... Following their break-up, Tina was inspired to research how much success women have in dating versus men - adding: 'What we can observe across the board is that women, by literally every metric, are somewhat more successful in terms of dating an sexual things than men.'...  'The incel communities, I realised, have fundamentally misidentified the problem.   'Most incels that I came across think that their problem is women and the lack of attraction women feel towards them.  '[But I told them] the problem isn't that women aren't attracted to you, the problem is you're attracted to women'.  Following this, Tina tried a series of medications to try and suppress their desire - and discovered transmaxxing after fellow incel began scrutinising the movement... 'I had very strong evidence that a woman's life would be socially advantageous as well as sexually and possibly even attracting a girlfriend [...]...  a fellow 'transmaxxer' posted on the Reddit forum - where they revealed they had similarly been 'rejected by girls and bullied by the alphas for being a virgin loser'.  Sharing before-and-after photos of their transition, they claimed: 'Now the very same alpha males that bullied me bend on their knees just to have a chance of kissing my feet, my [direct messages] are full of thirsty men begging for my attention, and I'm having more sex than any alpha male ever.'... Vintologi, from southern Sweden, began working on the first Transmaxxing Manifesto in 2016 - having graduated from university with a degree in mathematics.   The 28-year-old, who has never revealed his full name, said the purpose was to 'reduce the surplus of males' who were growing increasingly angry over not being able to find a partner."
How foolish. Don't they know about Male Privilege?

Jennifer Sey on X - "This pitcher -- who goes by "Marissa" -- is a boy named Charlie. He is 6' tall and his Batting Against Average is .128. When boys compete in girls' high school sports, they win."

Thread by @_CryMiaRiver on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "There are now stacks of systematic reviews conducted independently all over the world showing there is precisely zero evidence to support youth gender medicine and the evidence of harm is undeniable.  Nova Scotia’s response?  Let’s open more paediatric gender clinics!...  Earlier this year, I wrote about the appalling failure of Canadian media covering the scandal of paediatric gender medicine. CBC, unsurprisingly, completely ignored my plea for balanced coverage"

Meme - Mia Hughes @_CryMiaRiver: "This is atrocious journalism. There is no excuse for spreading this dangerous misinformation at this point in the medical scandal. Shame on you, CBC."
"Puberty blockers are a reversible treatment that temporarily stop the progression of puberty, providing a child with more time to explore their identity - for example through clothing - without the distress that can come with going through developmental changes."

Jonathan Kay on X - "Yet another Andrew Lam CBC “news report” celebrating the sterilization of depressed children in Atlantic Canada"

How gender activists stole the media, distorted medicine, and hurt Canadian kids - "There is a major medical scandal unfolding in Canada, and our media is fuelling it. In gender clinics across the country, doctors put healthy adolescents on invasive medical procedures that can impair fertility, sexual function, and bone density, damage bodily systems, and result in the removal of healthy organs. Teenage girls are being put into menopause, and young men are being chemically and surgically castrated. This is all done without a clear diagnosis or solid scientific evidence that these treatments are safe or beneficial.  Yet Canada’s mainstream media portrays these interventions, euphemistically called “gender-affirming care,” as evidence-based, medically necessary, and lifesaving. Top outlets such as CBC, CTV, and Global present paediatric gender medicine as uncontroversial.   The scandal of paediatric gender medicine contains all the elements of a sensational news story – conspiracy, intrigue, deception, and blackmail. It involves powerful institutions suppressing dissent, whistleblowers risking their careers to speak out, and innocent young people being harmed in the crossfire. There are medical professionals ignoring basic ethical principles, activists influencing policy under the guise of science, and victims being vilified and silenced. All this should prove irresistible to the inquisitive journalistic mind. Which makes it all the more puzzling that, aside from the National Post, Canada’s mainstream media has opted to ignore the story and instead act as a mouthpiece for extremist trans activists, uncritically echoing their talking points... before Dutch researchers introduced puberty suppression for trans-identified adolescents, studies showed that 63 per cent to 98 per cent of youth eventually outgrew their gender distress. However, once puberty blockers were implemented, nearly all adolescents progressed to irreversible cross-sex hormones, with persistence rates of 98 per cent to 100 per cent. The explanation for this striking reversal of persistence rates is that the cognitive and sexual development that occurs during puberty naturally resolves gender dysphoria in most cases. Blocking puberty, therefore, means blocking the natural cure for gender-related distress.  Yet our mainstream media continues to call puberty blockers reversible because Canada’s “experts” in “gender-affirming care” continue to cling to this belief, despite the mounds of scientific evidence to the contrary. It is the same for the claim that affirming a young person’s transgender identity and providing access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries amounts to “life-saving care.” The most pernicious of all trans activist misinformation, the transition-or-suicide narrative is ubiquitous in Canada’s mainstream coverage of this controversial medical treatment... a young trans-identified person is quoted as saying, “If I wasn’t able to start this therapy, honestly, I probably wouldn’t be here anymore.” This content directly contradicts suicide prevention guidelines, which emphasize that the media must never oversimplify or attribute suicide to a single cause because suicide is known to be socially contagious.   The truth is the transition-or-suicide claim rests on exceptionally flimsy scientific evidence. Surveys of trans-identified youth do show increased risk of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, but completed suicide in this population is rare. The elevated risk is likely due to co-existing mental health issues that are extremely common in youth who identify as transgender. All systematic reviews to date have found no good quality evidence to support the transition-or-suicide narrative, and the Cass Report and a recent robust study out of Finland reached the same conclusion. The final most common falsehood repeated by our top news outlets is that very few people regret undergoing these hormonal and surgical procedures... (the review cited by CBC is among the most poorly conducted study in a field already known for exceptionally low standards, leading one exasperated critic of the paper to ask, “where exactly is the line between incompetence and fraud?”)   These falsehoods remain ever-present in Canada’s reporting on paediatric gender medicine because our journalists have misplaced trust in medical associations, most notably the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). WPATH, an activist group masquerading as a medical association, has been thoroughly discredited in recent years, but these revelations have failed to penetrate the Canadian media landscape.  Even more remarkably, it is not only the media who were duped by WPATH. Almost every major medical association in North America, including the Canadian Paediatric Society, follows the lead of this fraudulent activist group that sets standards of care based on flimsy science, buries evidence that does not align with its political goals, and believes “eunuch” is a valid gender identity even children can possess.   The WPATH Files, released in March 2024, revealed professionals within WPATH, including a prominent Canadian endocrinologist, are aware that children and adolescents are not capable of understanding the lifelong implications of puberty suppression, that there is significant regret among this cohort, and that gender-affirming clinicians are conducting an unregulated experiment on people who identify as transgender... what journalism is meant to do: present the full picture. But in a media landscape dominated by trans activists, news outlets abandoned balanced reporting. In May 1941, the Saturday Evening Post published an article with the headline “Turning the Mind Inside Out.” In it, Waldemar Kaempffert, an editor of the New York Times, described a miraculous new brain surgery called a lobotomy that cut “worries, persecution complexes, suicidal intentions, obsessions, indecisiveness and nervous tensions” out of the mind... Kaempffert’s article was just one of many glowing media endorsements of what would become one of medicine’s greatest atrocities...   The misleading coverage of “gender-affirming care” has a similarly dangerous impact...   In February 2024, Radio-Canada’s EnquĂȘte team produced a stunning piece of investigative journalism in which an actress posing as a trans-identified 14-year-old obtained a prescription for testosterone after just a nine-minute appointment at a private gender clinic in Quebec. In response, local trans activists smashed the windows of the Radio-Canada headquarters in Montreal...   One of the greatest challenges in exposing the scandal of paediatric gender medicine is that the truth is so shocking it defies belief... It sounds like a wild conspiracy theory. Yet every word is true. Which means now more than ever, journalists must do their job"
This is why left wingers hate the National Post so much - it accurately reports the truth
With lobotomies, the state didn't lobotomise kids against parents' will, so trans mania is even worse

Gays Against Groomers on X - "Here she is—a smug 'Transhausen' mom, casually sipping coffee & gleefully singing after abducting her own child from his father. She trafficked him to Colorado, all so she could strip the father of his rights and rush to sterilize & mutilate her son—with a smile & song. DEPRAVED"

Boy 'quizzed by counter-extremist officers' for saying 'there are only two genders' - "A 12-year-old boy has allegedly been referred to counter-terrorism authorities after posting an online video saying "there's no such thing as non-binary".  The child, who remains unnamed, reportedly created the video to counter bullies who had mistakenly assumed he supported transgender rights. In the footage, he reportedly declares: "[I'm] gay not queer."  According to the boy's mother, school officials informed her that the video had prompted them to report her son to Prevent, the Home Office programme aimed at thwarting potential terrorists.  It is understood that authorities may have linked the boy's expressed views to right-wing ideology, leading to the controversial referral. The incident has raised questions about the interpretation and application of anti-radicalisation measures in schools, particularly concerning young children expressing opinions on complex social issues. Concerns were also reportedly raised that the boy, who is Jewish, said he wanted Hamas to be “wiped out” and told bullies he would “exterminate” them... 'We think that he was targeted as the children believe gay people agree with trans ideology.  â€œHe made a video which I uploaded to YouTube where he said 'there are only two genders' and 'I'm gay not queer'.  â€œThe school phoned up and were incensed by it. They said that they would refer him to Prevent for that video.  â€œThey said that he was at risk of radicalisation - not that he had been, but was a risk when he gets to 13 and is entitled to his own social media accounts.  â€œThere was a risk he would fall in with far right groups.”  She did not identify the far right groups that he is considered to be at risk of joining and the boy’s secondary school has not been made known.   The authorities were also said to be curious about a toy crossbow that had been bought from an English Heritage.  The mother added that bullies had attacked the boy’s Jewish heritage by making Nazi salutes and it was said that they forced him to drink another child’s urine.  â€œWe sat down with the Prevent officers and there was an interrogation - they had an attitude of 'we'll ask the questions'.  â€œWe were asked if we monitored his social media and what songs he listens to.  â€œThey said there was a whole series of things he had been accused of.”"
Time to detain the "Far Right" to keep Jews safe
CLearly PREVENT is Islamophobic and oppresses minorities

Monday, June 30, 2025

Links - 30th June 2025 (2 - Climate Change)

Will Shackel on X - "Australia’s climate tsar Matt Kean seemed shocked to hear that renewables were subsidised. This is the taxpayer funded activist who thinks Australia can run on solar and batteries and constantly attacks anyone who proposes adding nuclear power to a balanced energy mix."

Lachlan Phillips exo/acc đŸ‘Ÿ on X - "I was in Extinction Rebellion for several years. I produced over 60 videos for them and helped with several protests.  I can tell you directly: It was never about the climate. It was about controlling you.   Specifically, it was about mobilising 3.5% of the population into permanent revolutionary protest in order to trigger a Communist revolution. (Per Trotsky, Sharp, Hallam, Mao)  This was told to me directly by some of the leaders of the organisation. I tried to organise some programs to help businesses lower their carbon footprints without lowering profit margins or impacting the GDP, and I was told in no uncertain terms that *solutions* were counter to the goals of the movement and that I should stop.  It was then that I started to realise their true motives, and understand that perhaps I was being taken for a ride.  I learned that Communist countries have had some of the WORST environmental records in existence. What XR was proposing - degrowth, agitation, "decolonisation", post-capitalism and every other agitprop buzzword - would effectively drop civilisation back to a pre-renewable era and force developing nations into a protracted industrial age, leading to ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more carbon emissions than the incremental improvements found by market innovations.  Population density is a critical function of renewable energy infrastructure. You don't have a factory. You have a market ecosystem. That's how technology works. It blew my mind that they didn't understand this.  After years of pushing against fossil fuels, they were suddenly vehemently opposed to Elon Musk and his EVs. It was mind boggling to witness.  I realised that Musk had singlehandedly done more to reduce emissions than the entire climate activist movement combined. And it's not close. Mentioning this, I was met with bewilderment and anger.  It was very hard to come away from that experience with much sympathy for the activist left movement. At their best they were devoid of ideas and completely incapable of making meaningful technological or engineering innovations. At their worst, they were actively working against their own stated goals in order to maximise agitation and mobilise discontent toward a destructive revolutionary movement that would ultimately lead to measurably worse outcomes.  Applying Occam's Razor, it became apparent to me that the goal is Communist revolution, and all these random causes - climate, gender relativism, immigration, BLM, defunding police, Islamisation etc etc etc weren't about triumphing over injustices, but about agitating blocs of useful idiots into a perpetual state of protest in order to seize power and control in the name of Marxist Revolution.  I thought they were creators and visionaries. I was wrong.  True change comes from the builders. Yes there are problems on this earth, but they'll only be solved by you tackling those problems, building useful things and helping to push the species forward.  If you're smart enough to contribute, you belong amongst the builders."
Clearly, if you think climate change is an excuse to push socialism, you're a far right conspiracy theorist who believes misinformation

Judith Curry on X - "JP Morgan's annual energy report is always an excellent read. "after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year.""
Clearly, even more money needs to be spent

Canadian man sentenced to 25 years for attack on Keystone XL Pipeline, US energy infrastructure - "A Canadian man has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for attacking energy infrastructure in the United States, causing $1.7 million in damages. A judge ruled that his crimes met the legal definition of terrorism.  Cameron Smith, 50, originally from the Toronto area but living in Astoria, Oregon, was sentenced on Monday. In addition to prison time, he was ordered to pay over $2.1 million in restitution and $250,000 in fines. Smith also faces deportation upon his release... Smith’s defense attorney, Douglas Passon, pushed back, describing his client as a "hyper-aware individual wanting to create awareness about climate change" who intentionally chose remote locations to prevent harm to people.  In the South Dakota case, Smith’s attack led to the shutdown of a Keystone XL Pipeline pump station, causing a leak that damaged surrounding land. In North Dakota, he damaged transformers and infrastructure at an electrical substation, leading to power outages for 243 customers.  During sentencing, Smith told the court he had resorted to direct action out of frustration after years of attempting to raise awareness about climate change through legal channels. He pleaded for a lesser sentence, citing his autism and Crohn’s disease"
Climate change hysteria has very real consequences

EDITORIAL: Food for thought on climate change - "A recent report by the Fraser Institute points out that climate activists who demand governments cut greenhouse gas emissions in agricultural production risk world food security by pushing up the cost of fertilizer and other farming costs. “It turns out that the impact of cutting emissions harms food production much more than climate change does,” the report says. "Surprisingly, a green, low-carbon world produces less and more expensive food and makes over 50 million more people hungry by mid-century.” This becomes a more pressing issue now, with ardent “net zero” crusader, Prime Minister Mark Carney, at the helm... Claims that carbon cuts are a priority because climate change is causing world hunger are alarmist and far from true. “Over the past century, hunger has dramatically declined. In 1928, the League of Nations estimated that more than two-thirds of humanity lived in a constant state of hunger,” the report says. Since 2008, less than one-tenth of the world’s population has gone hungry, although the COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have increased that percentage slightly from 7% to about 9% in 2023. “Since 1990, the average number of children dying has declined dramatically from 6.5 million to 2.5 million each year. This is an incredible success story,” the report says. Better farming techniques have resulted in the increased production of food at a lower price, the report says. While the impact of climate change is often depicted as being catastrophic, in reality it will have only a slight impact. “In reality, it means that things will get much better slightly slower.”
Time to blame 'greedy companies'

Pierre Poilievre vows to scrap industrial carbon tax - "If the party forms government, the Conservative leader promised to expand the clean technology and clean manufacturing investment tax credit to encourage companies to lower emissions. For example, he argued that cutting taxes on Canadian steel and aluminum production, which emits less carbon than that of foreign producers such as China, will push those foreign companies to move production here, lowering global emission in the process... Asked if he was prepared to commit Canada to any form of emissions target if he is elected prime minister, Poilievre demurred. “What would my emissions target look like? I treat this as a global problem. By bringing home production from more polluting foreign jurisdictions, we reduce global emissions while growing our own paycheques,” he said. In “axing the tax” on Friday, Carney was cribbing from Poilievre.. Multiple climate policy groups and researchers said Poilievre’s promise to abolish the industrial pricing scheme is misguided. They argue that it is in fact an effective tool to incentivize low-carbon investments in Canada. “ Dismantling industrial carbon pricing would be a mistake that robs Canada of a critical tool to attract billions in investment and create jobs across the country,” said Clean Prosperity President Michael Bernstein said. In a separate statement, the Canadian Climate Institute argued that the industrial carbon pricing system contributes to three times more emissions reductions than the consumer carbon tax and does not directly raise prices for the public."
Clearly imposing a tax attracts net new investment, and if consumers do not see direct price increases, the increases don't affect them (of course, they can just blame "greedy companies")

Two cross-country pipelines could've diverted $38.4 billion from the U.S., new study finds - "The tariff war with the United States could have been very different if Canada had decided to build the Energy East and LNG Quebec pipelines over the past decade, according to a new study by the Montreal Economic Institute. Both pipelines could have redirected $38.4 billion worth of energy products per year to markets other than the United States and the institute argues that the construction of pipelines between Eastern and Western Canada “would have helped diversify Canadian export markets” significantly. In 2023, Canada exported 97 per cent of its crude oil to the United States. “Canada’s high level of dependence on U.S. trade is not unavoidable. It is the direct result of years of policy decisions that have delayed or actively impeded major infrastructure projects,” said Gabriel Giguùre, senior policy analyst and author of the report at MEI... both projects now receive a tremendous amount of support from Quebecers and both Liberals and Conservatives support pipeline construction in the context of a trade war with the United States. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently said that Canada should immediately build a pipeline “in the east so we can supply our own country with energy.” Mr. Harper was speaking Tuesday during a panel on energy at the Raisina Dialogue, India’s largest geopolitical conference. However, the costs of building such infrastructures have risen considerably."
Too bad climate change hysteria and sabotaging the economy was more important than performative patriotism by hating the US

Fury as Heathrow's lack of back-up power causes 'a contained version of 9/11': Small fire at power station leaves more than 200,000 travellers, and others forced to turn around in mid-air - "One industry source has claimed that Net Zero is to blame because Heathrow is moving from diesel back-up generators to biomass.   Reform MP Richard Tice said: 'It appears that Heathrow had changed its backup systems in order to be, wait for it...Net Zero compliant’.  â€˜They had got rid of their diesel generators and had moved towards a biomass generator that was designed not to completely replace the grid but work alongside it. Their net zero compliant backup system has completely failed in its core function at the first time of asking’... Julian Bray, one of the UK's leading aviation experts said: 'We are all amazed that Heathrow does not have a viable standby independent of the grid emergency power supply but relies on the National Grid. It's not as if Heathrow is short of money - it has a substantial war chest for building the third runway'."

Meme - James Melville @JamesMelville: "The sheer lunacy of Heathrow airport swapping reliable diesel generators with a net zero biomass system."
"The Absurdity of Heathrow's Biomass Fiasco
The power outage that paralysed Heathrow on March 21, 2025, exposes a ludicrous twist in its Net Zero quest: swapping reliable diesel generators for an award-winning biomass system-powered by locally sourced wood chips- that takes hours to fire up. In 2012, Heathrow unveiled its Terminal 2 biomass Combined Heat and Power plant, a 10MW beacon of sustainability, cutting 13,000 tonnes of annually and lauded as the UK's largest "own use" renewable setup. By 2023, it celebrated further green strides, with solar panels and electric vehicles bolstering its eco-credentials. Yet, as an emergency backup, this biomass relic is a farce. Diesel kicks in within seconds, keeping runways lit and skies safe. Biomass dawdles-hours to reach full power, better for steady warmth than sudden blackouts. When a fire at North Hyde substation in 2025 felled both grid and backups, stranding 1,300 flights, it hinted this green darling couldn't cope. The 2023 fanfare over sustainability feels hollow now: Net Zero's noble pursuit has left Heathrow vuinerable, a global hub undone not by storms or foes, but by the folly of prizing untested green tech over proven resilience, leaving passengers to rue an award-winning dream turned nightmare."

Meme - Dangerously Right of Marx: "Literally from the same day."
"Earth is spinning faster than it used to. Clocks might have to skip a second to keep up."
"Melting polar ice is slowing the Earth's rotation, with possible consequences for timekeeping. A new study found that ice loss caused by climate change is redistributing mass on the Earth enough to alter its spin."
Trust the Science!

Darren Grimes on X - "Ed Miliband admits the solar panels he bought for English schools and hospitals are made in China
 potentially using coal. So let me get this straight: Labour’s GB Energy is a vehicle for taxing Brits to import Chinese-made solar panels, manufactured with coal power and possibly slave labour?  All so we can feel morally superior while shutting down our own industries?  Make it make sense!"

Green energy tycoons go to war over Ed Miliband’s net zero grid - "Jackson’s key criticism of the UK’s current “crazy” power system is the way it has encouraged developers to build vast wind farms in Scotland, despite there not being power cables to transfer the electricity generated to customers.  This leads to thousands of turbines being unnecessarily turned off, he says, costing billpayers millions of pounds in the process... Vince released a carefully crafted report warning that zonal pricing would be massively complex, delay the UK’s net zero programme and burden poorer households with extra charges. And that was before he launched a personal attack on Jackson.  â€œI don’t understand why Greg Jackson is evangelical about it,” says Vince. “But part of me thinks that he’s looking for a cause to campaign for and make a name for himself because there are so many better things we can do to bring energy prices down.”"
Ironically, looking for a cause to campaign for and make a name for yourself explains climate change hysteria

Thread by @KallumPickering on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Net Zero = zero productivity? Today at @PeelHunt we publish analysis which challenges the government’s claim that there is no trade-off between Net Zero and economic growth. Two decades of experience suggests otherwise. A thread with lots of important charts
We begin our analysis with a simple observation - that the decline in UK electricity availability, which started in 2006, coincided with the start of structural weakness in UK productivity growth. Electricity availability has declined by 21% since peaking in 2005. This decline has occurred, by and large, due to the planned decommissioning of various types of electricity production facilities – most notably coal and oil, but also nuclear. The infliction point for electricity availability also coincided another trend - the UK became a net-importer of oil and gas in the early 2000s. At this point the story becomes a bit econ101. Declining supply of a key factor of production (energy) in an economy with growing demand. What happens next? Obvious, a precipitous rise in energy costs. Here are industrial energy prices - which had been steady until 2005. And here are consumer prices for energy. . . same story. Roughly stable until 2005, and then everything gets worse as electricity supplies begin to decline. The UK now has the highest domestic electricity prices in the advanced world
Next question - why care about productivity at all? That is easy. Productivity is the major driver of living standards - the broadest measure being GDP per capita. Here we see the same trend as we do in the productivity data - i.e. structural weakness since the mid-2000s. At this point we broaden our analysis to look at a broader sample of economies - 189 to be exact. Here is the relationship between per capita GDP and per capita energy consumption. The conclusion is clear - energy matters for prosperity. We then compare the UK to the US - here we see two very different choices in the recent past. While the US has been growing living standards while keeping energy consumption stable, the UK has been holding its living standards stable while cutting energy consumption.
Let us ask then, yes the UK has paid a price in terms of living standards - but it has it at least made a difference to global emissions? Sadly not. The UK has halved its territorial C02 emissions versus peak - but accounts for less than 1% of the global total... The UK’s decarbonisation efforts, so far, have resulted in weak economic growth, high energy prices, stagnant productivity and no significant impact on global emissions. The silver lining of hope is that official projections indicate a steady rise in electricity available into the middle of the century - which should ease this headwind and (hopefully) help to bring energy costs down. But it hinges on a successful build-out of renewables (and some gas capacity) - which so far have been hampered by planning delays and will require imports of critical minerals from far away places. It won't be easy"
Time to destroy the economy and impoverish everyone in order to virtue signal!

House Committee Says It Finds Evidence of 'Climate Cartel' - "The House Judiciary Committee said it’s found “substantial evidence of collusion and anticompetitive behavior” by the financial industry to “impose radical ESG-goals” on US companies. An interim report published by the Republican-led committee said “a cartel” of financial firms and climate activists sought to replace Exxon Mobil Corp. board members in 2021 after the company declined to make a series of climate pledges.  â€œUnfortunately, the pressure campaign against Exxon Mobil isn’t an isolated incident,” the committee wrote. “Through coordinated shareholder pressure campaigns at US companies, the climate cartel seeks to use the trillions of dollars it manages to impose its agenda on the US economy and drain it of affordable energy.”... The judiciary committee, chaired by Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, singled out groups including Climate Action 100+ and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero for leading what they described as a climate crusade... BlackRock Inc., Vanguard Group Inc. and State Street Corp. were sued by a group of states led by Texas for allegedly breaking antitrust laws by boosting electricity prices through their investments."

Tristin Hopper on X - "CANADA: "We have a shitload of natural gas we should sell it."
LIBERALS: "This European company said they'd build us a battery factory and all we have to do is pay for the entire thing."
CANADA: "Okay, but the gas .. "
LIBERALS: "We'll build our OWN auto sector!""

Meme - Chris Brunet @realChrisBrunet: "according to this chart, the entire nation of Canada just spent 5 whole years fighting over a carbon tax that crippled the nation's economy to offset just *37 hours* worth of China's carbon"
"how many hours does it take China to produce 50 Mt of CO2e, answer short"
"About 37 hours, based on China's 2023 emissions of 11.9 Gt CO2e annually."
Weird how China didn't get inspired by Canada to cut its emissions, as climate change hystericists claimed it would

A new energy model is here: ‘carbonizing’ - "When Canada’s next prime minister, Mark Carney, delivered his Liberal leadership acceptance speech on Sunday, the former captain of the United Nations’ climate action and finance squad and global champion of net-zero carbon emissions somehow failed to mention the subject he spent most of the past decade pursuing. The closest he came to referencing his plan to eliminate carbon emissions from the global energy system was a shot at his Conservative opponent, Pierre Poilievre, who Carney said would “allow our planet to burn.” Otherwise, Carney said he would make Canada “an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy.” Never mind that envisioning Canada as an energy superpower is a concept stolen from former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, who invented the slogan 20 years ago. Could it be that Carney has checked out the latest state of the global carbon and energy situation and is now ready to endorse the growing realization that his net-zero carbon target is an impossible objective?... The emptiness of the net-zero crusade is on full display this week in Houston, Texas, where the world’s leading energy corporations and policy-makers are gathered for the annual CERAWeek conference. Ironically, one of the opening-day speakers was Larry Fink, head of the US$11.5-trillion investment giant BlackRock and one of Carney’s cronies who helped fund the 2020 Mainstream report. Fink made it clear on Monday that there is no cheap and fast route to net zero. Regarding decarbonization technology, Fink said the options are “highly inflationary” because of high startup costs. Across the board, “we have to be working side by side in trying to find ways of reducing the cost of wind and solar and other energy sources. But let’s be clear. We are going to be dependent on dispatchable power for a long, long time.” In other words, fossil fuels will be needed. Power companies and their investors, said Fink, are changing their plans as demand for electricity soars. “About four years ago, they would say, if we’re building a data centre, it must be renewables. About two years ago, they said we preferred renewables. And today, they care about power.” But that’s just a flutter of the commentary swirling around the CERAWeek conference that describes the crumbling foundations of Mark Carney’s anti-fossil-fuel campaign, a major inspiration for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax and other interventionist energy policies. CERAWeek, organized by S&P Global, is chaired by energy economist Daniel Yergin, who has been warning for years that soaring energy demand and growing geo-political conflict threaten to upset the much-vaunted global energy transition. Last year he warned about “The collision between energy and geopolitics, the struggle to define what (the) energy transition actually means and the turnaround on electricity.” That message looms even larger today. In a new paper on the energy transition crisis in the March-April edition of Foreign Affairs, Yergin and co-authors argue that the share of hydrocarbons in the global economy increased steadily over the past three decades, continuing to make up 80 per cent of global primary energy mix compared with 85 per cent in 1990. Instead of an “energy transition” we are in an “energy addition” with carbon-based energy sources growing in tandem with other sources. As energy demand grows due to tech requirements, political turmoil, mineral production demand and the desperate need for energy in under-developed nations, Yergin says the transition will need to be rethought. “Almost half the population of the developing world — three billion people — annually use less electricity per capita than the average American refrigerator does.” In coming years, Yergin’s paper concluded, “carbonizing” will need to precede “decarbonizing.” A more detailed recent report from JP Morgan by Michael Cembalest reaches similar conclusions... At CERAWeek, the CEO of Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, said that “the current strategy of prematurely switching to immature alternatives has been so self-destructive. New sources cannot even meet the growth in demand.”"

Dramatic cuts in China’s air pollution drove surge in global warming - "A recent surge in the rate of global warming has been largely driven by China’s efforts to reduce air pollution, raising questions about how air quality regulations are influencing the climate and whether we fully understand the impact of removing aerosols from the atmosphere. This extra warming, which was being masked by the aerosols, accounts for 5 per cent of global temperature increase since 1850."
Oops. Clearly, the West needs to cut its own emissions even more to compensate and destroy its economy even faster, as China builds more coal plants

Andrew Neil on X - "The nauseating hypocrisy of E Miliband is jaw-dropping. He and his kind across the political class — Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, SNP — promoted the very energy policies that lumbered Britain with the highest industrial energy costs in the world, making industries like steel uneconomic. They tolerated no dissent from their net zero nonsense even as deindustrialisation gathered pace. And now Miliband has the audacity to pose as the saviour of British steelworkers! In truth, the British political class has shamefully failed them, none more so than net zero zealot Miliband."

The death of the carbon tax - "The carbon tax, once hailed as the simplest approach to curbing GHG emissions — even by the oil and gas sector — is now on life support. And perhaps deservedly so, given its political mismanagement... The carbon tax was also undermined by a growing hodgepodge of federal and provincial regulations, mandates and subsidies to decarbonize the economy. Why tax carbon, people rightly asked, if we have all these other policies to reduce emissions?... Will EV mandates, low-carbon fuel regulations, oil and gas emission caps and clean electricity rules be next for the chopping block? Ottawa’s latest “net-zero accountability report” lists 100 federal regulations, grants, codes and other policies — of which a fifth, including the oil and gas cap and clean electricity regulations, are facing implementation hurdles. On top of this, the federal government has failed to model projections, indicators, a timetable and key measures to reduce emissions. No surprise here — the net-zero agenda is basically unmanageable."

GM to halt EV van production in Ontario to adjust for market demand

The use and abuse of climate science - "Steven E Koonin: Weather is not climate. Weather is what happens every day. It is highly variable – it changes from one day to the next. Climate, according to official definitions, plays out over decades. It changes slowly.  When a scientist sees an extreme-weather event, his first instinct is to ask, how unusual is that? Have we seen similar events before, say in the 1950s, when human influences on the climate were pretty darn small? If so, we might wonder if it’s due to humans at all, or if humans have only a moderate role. Long, precise records are really important in understanding how the climate is changing. In New York City, we had record rainfall in Central Park a couple of weeks ago. We don’t have good hourly rainfall data going back 150 years, but we do have good daily rainfall data. It shows that this rainy day was only the fifth rainiest day in New York City’s history. The rainiest day happened in 1879. There were many other pretty rainy days that were spread out over the past 150 years. So it was not an obvious change in the climate.  You can do the same sort of thing for record-high temperatures, which are not increasing over the US as a whole. This is all quite contrary to what you would take away if you were just reading the newspapers or listening to weather presenters.
 O’Neill: One of the clearest examples of a presumption people make about climate events is around the question of melting ice sheets. When I speak in schools in the UK, I always see kids’ paintings of a polar bear standing on an ice sheet, looking very hungry, sad and lonely. There’s a kind of morality tale – that if only we would change our behaviour to become more eco-friendly, we could save the ice sheets and the polar bear. But you argue that, for example, Greenland’s ice sheet is not shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago. So how true is the claim that all the ice is melting and that it’s going to cause huge tidal waves across the world?
 Koonin: It’s certainly true that as the planet is warming, we expect ice sheets on land to start losing mass. On the other hand, as I mention in the book, the rates at which Greenland is losing ice are highly variable. They were high in the 1930s. And then they were low. And then they were high again. This happened even as the globe was warming steadily. So there is most likely a large natural variability in the ice sheets. You have got to take that into account as a scientist if you are going to say that humans are causing the recent melting.  Of course, people who want to create alarm about the climate will point to the past couple of decades and how the melting rate has gone up. But they don’t have an explanation for why it was also going up 80 years ago... If you look at [the IPCC's] most recent report, it features a discussion of sea-level rises. The important thing to understand about sea levels is not that they are rising – they have been doing that for 15,000 years. The real question is whether they are rising more rapidly in recent decades because of human influence, as opposed to the natural rate. The IPCC talks about how the rate in the past few decades has been a lot greater than the average for the 20th century. But it entirely fails to mention that around 1940 it was rising almost as rapidly as it is today. And then it went down. I would fail a student if they did what the IPPC did, because it is not at all an honest presentation of the data."

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