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Friday

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19 comments to Friday

  • #
    Skepticynic

    Even Canadian fake conservative Erik Kaufmann acknowledges woke progressivism is dead and dying.
    Western governments are a bit slow to catch on.

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1922973741740437843.html

    We are entering a post-progressive era. The cultural left-liberalism which emerged a century ago and took off in the late 1960s is exhausted

    Post-Trump the Left are beginning to wake up and de-woken. They’re licking their wounds, de-constructing, and doing the soul-searching that Australian so-called conservative Liberal parties need to do.
    Here in the colonies we’re a bit slow to catch on.

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    • #
      Ted1

      “Post-progressivism argues that the end of the progressive grand narrative demands a new social science”.

      Well I’ll be woken!

      And he’s post Trump already!

      40

  • #
    Skepticynic

    UK Citizen Sentenced to 10 Years in Saudi Arabia Over Deleted Tweet

    A British citizen has been handed a 10-year prison sentence in Saudi Arabia over a tweet that no longer exists and was seen by barely a few dozen people. The post, erased years ago from an account with just 37 followers, is now at the center of a case that exposes how harshly the Kingdom is punishing digital speech.
    Ahmed al-Doush, a senior business analyst with Bank of America, was taken into custody at Riyadh’s main airport on August 31, 2024, as he prepared to return to the UK with his wife and children following a family trip. He never made it onto the plane. Saudi officials stopped him at the departure gate and transferred him to a maximum-security prison, where he was kept in isolation for more than a month.
    It would be five months before Saudi authorities disclosed the supposed basis for his arrest: accusations that he used social media to “spread false and harmful information…”

    etc.
    https://archive.ph/6DKHb

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    • #
      David Maddison

      That’s exactly what Once Great Britain does to its dissidents.

      Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 2 years and 7 months in the Goolag for a Tweet she posted in a moment of anger and then deleted after 3.5 hrs.

      Details: https://youtu.be/genMHmqOOWI

      No doubt under the new regime in Australia such things will soon start happening here now that the Left have a mandate to do whatever they please – and will!

      As for visiting countries like Once Great Britain as a tourist, one wonders if foreign tourists might get jailed there for past criticisms of the regime?

      And tourists, unless a follower of the official and only permitted religion of Saudi generally do not visit there (they used not to ne permiited at all), only business people. They would be wise not to go if they have ever criticised the regime.

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      • #
        David Maddison

        Tommy Robinson is another political prisoner of Once Great Britain.

        He’s in jail for the crime of making a documentary of which not one word has ever been refuted.

        Where are the human rights organisations?

        People in relatively free countries can watch the documentary here, and it hasn’t yet been banned in Australia:

        https://x.com/QWalesUK/status/1916844376086511846

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    • #
      Graham Richards

      That’s great. Now we know how to rid ourselves of the whole Canberra fiasco. We’ll have the lot of them invited to Saudi Arabia for a symposium on good governance & hopefully we’ll never see them again!! Misinformation my ar##.

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    • #
      David Maddison

      Since the UK Government does that same thing to its own citizens, I’ll doubt if they do anything to get this businessman out of jail.

      The Saudis probably knew they’d get away with this because they’re just emulating UK actions against their own people.

      What’s the UK going to say to them? “You can’t put people in jail for a deleted Tweet?”

      30

  • #
    David Maddison

    Even as a child, I thought this show waa stupid.

    “Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men”.

    It waa made 1952-1953, before I was born, but endlessly repeated by Their ABC for many years after that.

    https://youtu.be/hcF9JSxkUSE

    From Wikipedia:

    Flower Pot Men features the story of Bill and Ben, two men made of terracotta flower pots who live at the bottom of an English garden. A third character, Little Weed, of indeterminate species resembling either a sunflower or a dandelion with a smiling face, is shown growing between two large flowerpots. The three are also sometimes visited by a tortoise called Slowcoach and, in one particular episode, the trio meet a faintly mysterious character made out of potatoes, Dan the Potato Man.

    Typically, while the “man who worked in the garden” would be away having his dinner, the two flower pot men, Bill and Ben, would emerge from their pots. After a minor adventure, a slight mishap would occur, for which someone would then take the blame: “Which of these two flowerpot men, was it Bill or was it Ben?” the narrator would trill in a quavering soprano; the culprit would then confess, before the gardener’s footsteps would be heard coming up the garden path; the flower pot men then would vanish into their pots and the “Goodbye” screen would appear. The final punch-line was, “..and I think the little house knew something about it; don’t you?”.

    40

  • #
    David Maddison

    Gad Saad comment on Canada:

    https://x.com/GadSaad/status/1922883782626927097

    I love Canada. I’m Canadian. But Canada is no longer a serious country. It is irrevocably changed by a mixture of parasitized minds, cancerous socialism, and suicidal empathy.

    80

  • #

    Story tip
    https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/

    Caveats in the link, but it looks as if one national supplier of kit has inserted some ‘backdoors’.
    I would do the same – and fully intend to do so, if I can work out how to do so in a wooden Welsh lovespoon.
    And if it profitably restrict Chinese actions …

    Auto

    30

    • #
      David Maddison

      A Trojan horse.

      Just imagine if the Chicomms decided to turn off all Australian rooftop solar?

      The grid would probably collapse, especially after the government destroys the next coal power station.

      And that’s exactly why during the first TRUMP administration he banned the import of large scale electrical infrastructure from China, a ban reversed by Biden.

      https://www.akingump.com/en/insights/alerts/president-trump-establishes-framework-to-ban-the-use-of-foreign-sourced-equipment-in-the-us-electric-grid

      On May 1, 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order (E.O.) aimed at curtailing the use of foreign-sourced electric equipment installed on the U.S. “bulk-power system,” which is commonly understood to mean the U.S. interconnected electric grid. It authorizes the Secretary of Energy to block transactions involving certain bulk-power system electric equipment with a nexus to designated foreign adversaries.

      https://www.reuters.com/article/business/us-bans-utilities-supplying-defense-facilities-from-buying-power-grid-items-fr-idUSKBN28R31Q/

      WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. energy secretary on Thursday signed an order prohibiting electric utilities that supply critical defense facilities from importing certain power system items from China, in an effort to protect U.S. security from cyber and other attacks.

      https://www.powertransformernews.com/2021/04/23/us-department-of-energy-reverses-trump-ban-on-chinese-electrical-equipment/

      The US Department of Energy has reversed former President Trump’s ban on the import of certain electrical equipment from China.

      The announcement comes as part of a push to increase electrical grid security. China is one of the world’s major manufacturers of electrical grid equipment, and energy regulators cite the need to modernize equipment as part of the reason why the ban was reversed.

      The ban on Chinese electrical equipment began in December 2020, just one month before Trump was due to leave office, when the Department of Energy issued a prohibition order on such equipment. The order was authorized by Donald Trump last May when he signed Executive Order 13920, which declared a state of emergency over the state of the power grid. Cyberattacks are commonly directed at power grids, especially from state-sponsored hackers abroad.

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  • #
    David Maddison

    In this disarmingly honest, frank and confronting video, various black people comment about the situation in Africa and its overall lack of progress before and after Western colonial powers were kicked out. No, it wasn’t the fault of the colonisers, Ethiopia and Liberia were never colonised and still have the same situation. And all other countries elsewhere that were colonised such as Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, NZ, Singapore, United States etc. are all doing fine.

    https://youtu.be/YClIfiwBD_8

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  • #
    David Maddison

    Here is an EXTREMELY powerful piece of piano and violin played by 98 year old survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. They didn’t know each other had survived until recently.

    Tragic plus beautiful.

    https://youtu.be/KSNWJNXWl0M

    00

  • #

    The Administrative Procedures Act is a two edged sword.

    Seventeen states misguidedly sue to block Trump from stopping wind power
    By David Wojick
    https://www.cfact.org/2025/05/13/seventeen-states-misguidedly-sue-to-block-trump-from-stopping-wind-power/

    The beginning: “The attorneys general of 17 green states have jointly sued the President and the heads of a dozen federal agencies. Under the President’s day one executive order (EO), these agencies stopped approving pretty much anything to do with wind power development. The States want the Court to tell these Agencies to stop stopping.

    The basic issue is simple, but the possible outcomes are anything but. I think the States have not properly considered where this action might lead. In fact they have probably asked the Court for the wrong thing.”

    The ending: “The States specifically ask the Court to find that the Agencies are violating the APA and then to tell the Agencies not to obey the EO. That is all they ask for. I doubt a Court can tell an Agency not to obey a lawful EO. What they can do in this case is tell the Agencies that if they want to obey the EO they must comply with the APA when they do it.

    So let the Agencies do that. It would simply require that they each carry out their own investigation under their own authorities, which they can certainly do, jumping through all the APA hoops along the way. They can certainly suspend all their approvals, pending these investigations, because there is no telling where they might lead. Suspending approval pending investigation is fundamental law.

    It could all take a very long time with very interesting results, nothing like what the States are hoping for. In particular I would love to see each Agency take public comments on past deficiencies as there have been untold thousands of wind development complaints filed during the Biden years, all ignored. CFACT has filed a number of these.

    This may well be a case of the old adage “Be careful what you wish for.” Things could be worse for wind and the wind-loving green states than they already are. Stay tuned to CFACT as this legal drama plays out.”

    Lots of details in between.

    30

  • #
    David Maddison

    There is an amazing channel on YouTube called my mechanics.

    He restores old items to the most unbelievable levels of perfection and even makes them better than new. For example he removes casting imperfections. He also makes new parts where necessary. In a recent video he even machined a new wing nut. I’ve never seen that done before.

    His latest large scale project is restoring a Datsun 240Z. I have no doubt that car will be far better than it left the factory.

    https://youtube.com/@mymechanics

    10

  • #
    David Maddison

    Word of the day:

    tintinnabulum

    00

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