I missed the rule in "Risk" that when you attack #Ukraine, they get 4 rolls per defender and the attacker can only roll one die and only win with a 6. #SlavaUkraini #SlavaUkraine

If you’re not sure what the consequences of suicidal empathy can be, just take a look at the Green Party. What was once a movement that drew support from voters across the political spectrum, grounded in a desire to see greater emphasis on environmental protections and a sustainable pathway towards tackling climate change, is now a party full of gender ideologues and anti-Semites. And how did this happen? Because, in their desperation to demonstrate their kindness, compassion and inclusivity, the Greens threw open their doors to anyone who claimed to be oppressed or marginalised, apparently without stopping to ask whether the people they were welcoming shared their values. They were so determined not to appear intolerant that they ended up tolerating the intolerant. And those with the most extreme agendas have taken full advantage. Climate change is no longer the priority. The destruction of Israel is. And the destruction of women’s sex-based rights. And the destruction of safeguards for children experiencing distress about their sexuality or identity. And the destruction of parental rights for those who want to stop their children making potentially life-ruining decisions on the back of some nonsense they’ve watched on TikTok. This is what the Green Party has become. A ragtag collection of contradictory worldviews, expressed by angry misfits and intellectually stunted “liberals” who hold deeply authoritarian and illiberal views, but couldn’t explain any of them if pressed. Green Party members are essentially affiliated to a cult. A revolutionary movement that stands for everything and nothing. One that professes kindness and compassion while making excuses for murder and rape carried out by racist death cult terrorists against innocent Jewish people. One that believes any man in a dress should have the same rights as women, while aligning itself with the sort of conservative Muslim voter who thinks homosexuals are an abomination, never mind transsexuals. And here’s the supreme irony. The very people who pride themselves on being the most enlightened, compassionate and tolerant members of society have allowed their movement to be captured by people whose beliefs are fundamentally at odds with the liberal values they claim to cherish. So desperate were they to avoid excluding anyone that they’ve ended up surrendering the very purpose of their party. If you’re a serious person, you can’t support the Greens anymore. I’m sorry. And if we’re all destroyed by climate change, we thoroughly deserve it. But none more so than those who’ve allowed the Green Party to be so utterly hijacked and inverted at a time when a serious environmental movement is needed more than ever.

Three years on from 7 October, the left’s vicious lies about Israel are falling apart. These bigots should never be forgiven, says Brendan O’Neill buff.ly/v0hJX0j

A Statement of Conscience on October 7 I will not start by saying ‘as a Muslim’ or ‘as an imam’, but as a human being. On October 7, over 1,200 innocent people were killed in a single day. Families were shot in their homes. Young people out dancing were hunted across open fields. Over 250 people, including children and the elderly, were dragged into Gaza as hostages. I think of a mother hiding in a safe room with her baby’s mouth covered. I think of a father listening as the line went quiet. I think of families who waited month after month for someone to come home, only to receive a coffin. I didn’t need my faith to recognize the evil of what happened. My heart told me first. But I’m a Muslim and an imam, and I owe the world one honest sentence: what was done that day was a crime against God. God teaches that whoever kills one innocent soul, it is as if he had killed all humanity. This day has an author: Yahya Sinwar. He planned it, ordered it, and knew what would follow. Every death of that day and war he started rests on him and Hamas leaders who sat in tunnels and foreign hotels and called slaughter a victory. It rests on every Palestinian leader who cheered, excused, handed out sweets, or said nothing. They chose this. They own it. But Sinwar did not invent himself. He was the fruit of a tree planted almost a century ago by the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas named itself in its founding charter as the Brotherhood’s branch in Palestine. The Brotherhood’s poison is slow. It arrives through study circles, youth camps, charity boxes, and kind words to lonely young men. Drop by drop, it teaches him that his religion is a political party, his neighbour is his enemy, the Jew is the cause of his sorrow, and God is pleased by rage. By the time the gun arrives, the soul is already taken. I have seen this poison in mosques where sermons became rallies and young men could recite slogans but not sit still for a verse on mercy. Every people that let the Brotherhood in has paid in blood and ruined generations. It has never built anything it did not first set on fire. Behind Hamas stands another hand: the IRGC. It was the IRGC’s money, weapons, and training that turned a hateful idea into an army. One calls itself Sunni and the other Shia, and they may curse each other’s creeds, but they are united in what they worship. It is not God. It is power. The same IRGC that armed the killers of October 7 shoots Iranian girls for showing their hair, hangs young men for asking to be free, and has left graves from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut. They speak in God’s name. So did Pharaoh speak in the name of heaven. So let me say this clearly. Hamas and the IRGC are not merely enemies of Islam. That would be too small a charge, as if their crime were only against us. They are enemies of God. God is the Giver of life, yet they deal in death. God calls Himself the Most Merciful, yet they have made cruelty a sacrament. God honoured the children of Adam, yet they look at a child and see a target or a shield. To murder what God created and sign His name to it is the oldest blasphemy. And we Muslims have been too quiet. Some of us were afraid. Some told ourselves it was not our business. Some, God forgive them, felt something other than horror that morning and never confessed it. Silence was the soil this poison grew in. I will not add to it. So on this anniversary, let us say plainly what our scripture already says. The Jews are not our enemies. They are our cousins in Abraham, and their dead were created by the same God who created us. Today belongs to them: the murdered, the hostages, and families who still set a place at the table. To them I say: I am sorry for what was done to you by men who used the words of my prayers. You’re not alone in your grief or remembrance. The enemies of God are those who murder in His name. We know their names. It is time we said them from our own pulpits, in our own voices, before they speak for us again. Imam Tawhidi

Hello @SWRRLY please tell all your trains to TURN ON AIR CONDITIONING 🥵

“So do not dare propose that ‘Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine’. If anything, we wanted it too much. So now, it is your turn to answer the question: When did you ever truly want peace with the one Jewish state?” (my 10 min speech with English captions from the Oxford Union Debate):

I never understood before how he managed to bankrupt a casino, but I get it now

Leftists: Death to America, Mao Zedong was awesome, terrorism is good Normies: OK I don't want you on my side Leftists: Why do you oppose universal health care

Hasan Piker Says Anyone Trying To Twist His Words As Antisemitic Is A Dirty Lying Jew buff.ly/ABgk6GM

I often wish this great man was still with us, to lead us through ever darkening times. Let us honour his memory by fighting the scourge with everything we have, for the sake of humanity.

Don't go down the anti-Fauci rabbit-hole, @izakaminska He wasn't perfect, but it's the wrong hill to fight on if you want to have any credibility on logic or rationality.

The overwhelming right wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it's Joe Biden's fault.

I was recently in Europe, where the topic du jour was America. What I heard didn't surprise me, but the consistency did. Again and again, people asked the same question: Can America still be counted on? This week's NATO summit surely did little to reassure them. The Alliance itself is stepping up. More money for security — building upon a trend begun during the Biden Administration, when the number of allies devoting the long agreed 2% of GDP to defense went from 9 to 23. Greater industrial cooperation, including across the Atlantic.  Sustained support for Ukraine. A strong reaffirmation of its commitment to collective defense in the face of Russian provocations. The Trump Administration could and should have declared success. Instead, more public confrontations with allies, threats directed at fellow NATO members, and renewed suggestions about taking territory from a close partner dominated the headlines. The greater damage is quieter, and much harder to reverse. Many Europeans are no longer asking when America will return to the role it has played for generations. They are planning for a future in which it doesn't. For nearly eight decades, NATO and our broader network of alliances have been among our greatest strategic advantages. They have deterred aggression and so made war less likely, expanded our influence, strengthened our economy, and kept Americans safe. They allow us to share burdens rather than carry them alone. They multiply American power instead of diminishing it. These relationships were never acts of charity. They were built out of enlightened self-interest to advance our own security and prosperity. When allies lose confidence in the United States, they don't simply wait for Washington to change course. They adapt. They build new partnerships. They look elsewhere for leadership. Those decisions, once made, are difficult to undo. Our adversaries and competitors understand this. Russia has long sought to fracture the transatlantic alliance. China benefits whenever democratic nations are less able to act together. Every doubt cast on America's reliability is an opportunity for those who would prefer a weaker, more divided West.

Ironically, the Green movement are the "climate deniers"! Adaptation isn't becoming de-growth vegans, but embracing air-conditioning, building grid capacity, ensuring infrastructure can cope, GMO crops, CCS. IPCC and others have sometimes denigrate this as "maladaptation" 😣

This pilot won at life, but I hate seeing these great patriots retire. You just know when you see that gray hair and the American flag tie, you’re flying with the highest quality pilot.

Look at Haaland calling his teammates and coaches to line up and do the Row Row celebration with the fans. we’re talking about the best striker on the planet and a leader among men. wouldn’t have happened without him. 🇳🇴

I asked American students why they don’t protest when women are whipped and shot in Iran and Afghanistan. The answers expose a contradiction nobody wants to talk about. We must change the narrative so the younger generation stops lending cover to Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban and the Islamic Republic. That's why I choose to travel and speak to students face-to-face. I listen first, without judgment. Then I share what it means to live under Sharia law not as an abstraction, but as a lived reality. Truth is not a phobia. Calling out the whipping of women is not hate. Staying silent about it is.

The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don't win anymore!

Must-read from Sam Harris in @australian on why he refuses to engage in most Israel debates: because too often they start from false assumption that Israel is the problem, while ignoring the ideology that glorifies October 7, martyrdom and the destruction of the Jewish state.

Painfully dishonest degrowth piece. Here's a teardown. 1. The headline promises maths that isn't there. "We've done the maths" but the piece contains no calculation. Just two borrowed statistics and a policy wishlist. 2. The 92% figure isn't a measurement, it's a definition. "Excess" emissions means anything above an equal per-person share of the carbon budget going back to 1850. Define the rules that way and the North is guilty by construction. Pick a different baseline year or allocation rule and the number changes completely. It's a moral framework dressed up as arithmetic. 3. "Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity" is the opposite of the global record. Extreme poverty fell from roughly 38% of humanity in 1990 to under 9% before the pandemic, almost entirely through growth in China, India and East Asia. Not redistribution. Not aid. Growth. The claim is only half-true for median wages in some rich countries, and they quietly universalise it. 4. The headline contradicts the article's own sixth paragraph. Headline: growth is doomed. Paragraph six: low-income countries still need growth. So growth works precisely where the poor actually live. That's not a doomed strategy, that's the most successful anti-poverty mechanism in history with a footnote. 5. The decoupling double standard. This school insists GDP can never decouple from emissions (so growth must end), while claiming GDP has fully decoupled from wellbeing (so growth is pointless). Decoupling is impossible in one direction and total in the other, depending on which suits the argument. In reality 30-plus countries have cut emissions, including imported ones, while growing. 6. "Poverty is manufactured" is backwards. Poverty is the default condition of our species for all of history. Wealth is what had to be manufactured. Inequality is policy-shaped, fine, but treating destitution as something governments created implies it vanishes once they stop, which no historical evidence supports. 7. "Endless expansion on a finite planet" conflates money with stuff. GDP measures value, not tonnes. A therapy session, a software licence and a barrel of oil all count. Physical limits constrain material throughput, not value-added, and the two have been diverging for decades. The two claims that hold up: the top 10% producing nearly half of emissions (solid Chancel/Piketty data) and the debt-servicing figure. Everything structural around them is rhetoric wearing a lab coat. theguardian.com/commentisfre…

This is for you @MarksRaw