Mick Hartley

The new puritans. If comedy makes someone laugh, it'll very likely offend someone else. Best skip the jokes altogether. 

Hope everyone's up to date on all the rules for watching a bit of comedy in Glasgow – Glasgow! – these days. pic.twitter.com/Uyo8f0mzW0

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) January 9, 2025

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Billy Connolly wouldn't stand a chance. Nor Ken Dodd – "Freud said that the essence of the comic was the conservation of psychic energy. But then again, Freud never played second house, Friday night at the Glasgow Empire".

Under the Assad regime with Hezbollah’s help, Syria became the world’s largest producer of Captagon, accounting for 80% of global production.

This powerful stimulant known for erasing fear, numbing pain, and boosting endurance, is the same drug taken by Hamas terrorists on Oct… pic.twitter.com/yEZMWbboK9

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) January 9, 2025

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"This powerful stimulant known for erasing fear, numbing pain, and boosting endurance, is the same drug taken by Hamas terrorists on Oct 7.

"Someone is using drugs for their own benefit, but it isn't Israel."

This sounds horribly plausible. 

I just got into a debate with one of my democrat friends about trans surgery. I wish the conversation was recorded.

For background – she’s 33 years old, married, just had her first kid, and she voted for Kamala.

This is how the conversation went:

Me: If we’re going to let…

— shawn (@ShawnOnTheRight) January 8, 2025

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Full Text:

This is how the conversation went:

Me: If we’re going to let people mutilate their bodies, they should at least have to go through years of therapy before.

Friend: That’s like saying someone should have to go through therapy before getting married.

Me: No. One is reversible, the other is not. You can get a divorce. If you cut your d*ck off, you can’t grow it back if you change your mind.

Friend: I guess you could.

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: Well that’s what’s happening with the girls transitioning to boys.

Me: What?

Friend: The girls who are transitioning to boys, they start taking hormones…

Me: *interjects* Is that what you think happens? They take testosterone and then they just start GROWING A D*CK?

Friend: *confused* I mean yeah, how else do they get it?

Me: The video that I made the other day about gender affirming care, did you see it, the one with the deformed arm?

Friend: Yeah, but I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

Me: They take flesh and skin from the forearm, mold it into a pen*s shape, and attach it to the body. It’s not an actual pen*s.

Friend: Oh, that’s disgusting.

Me: You can’t just GROW A D*CK.

Apparently we have to do a better job educating the public on this issue. The democrats are walking around thinking these people are growing extremities.

I hate to imagine what these people think happens when men transition to women…

Photographer Richard Sharum has a long-term project exploring and documenting a 100 mile-wide corridor of land and people that runs through the Central United States, covering Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. He calls it Spina America.

Also known as flyover country.

This term, flyover country, was one I’d heard my entire life but had never really thought about when it came to the condescension it implied. I felt that this part of our country had been ignored politically, socially, and culturally for decades, with its obscurity creating a subtle but consequential vacuum that had implicitly added fuel to our national divisions.

[All images © Richard Sharum]

The Daily NK reports on North Korean troops in Ukraine:

The White House’s disclosure during a briefing late last year that around 1,000 North Korean soldiers deployed to Russia had been killed or wounded shocked the international community. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service likewise determined that around 10,000 North Korean troops had been sent to the front line in Russia’s Kursk region, and approximately 1,000 had been killed or wounded. Concerns that the North Korean troops sent to the Russia-Ukraine war would become cannon fodder seem to be becoming a reality.

Videos and photos appearing on Ukrainian military social media accounts are even more shocking. Experts note scenes of North Korean soldiers coming under drone attack as they cross snow-covered fields and images of dead soldiers with their faces destroyed. They say such footage demonstrates how North Korean soldiers — deployed to the front with little experience in actual combat — are dying in vain, along with North Korean-style barbarity that habitually engages in inhumane behavior in the name of “security.”

In particular, Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces released the diary of a dead North Korean soldier, with many experts noting the North Korean government’s contempt for human life. Given how the soldier talked of his “ingratitude” and “chance for redemption,” it appears the North Korean authorities sent him to the danger zone after promising to pardon him or reduce his prison sentence.

Daily NK asked a senior military official inside North Korea about the government’s view of the casualties in Russia, measures taken regarding those casualties and future plans.

Unfortunately this senior military official is not very informative – it's a surprise, frankly, that he'd talk to the Daily NK at all. So…

Daily NK: Are the North Korean authorities aware of fatalities suffered by North Korean forces deployed to Russia?

“The state has already received reports of the situation, with information delivered and reported as normal through the military command system. The military manages related information moment to moment, while the Supreme Command and Central Military Commission strictly manage the information regularly once a month through its reporting line.”

Daily NK: Has word of North Korean fatalities spread within the military?

“Indoctrination activities are being planned in the Storm Corps and other units from which combat personnel have been sent to Russia since authorities predict potential individual unrest or rumors.”

Hmm. Well, thanks for that.

Daily NK: With casualties seemingly mounting, why hasn’t a decision to withdraw been made?

“The decision to deploy troops to the battlefield was made to maintain the international military relationship between North Korea and Russia and to ensure the strategic national interests of the North Korean and Russian peoples, so a withdrawal is not being considered.”

It's all been decided between Putin and Kim Jong-un. They both know that the North Korean troops are just cannon fodder, and they don't care.

 

 

Of all the student papers I've ever received, my favorite is the one that began: "As Karl Marx wrote in his famous book, Selected Writings of Karl Marx, . . . "
It's the little touches that make teaching worthwhile.

— Joseph Bottum (@JosephBottum) January 8, 2025

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The Telegraph headline – Transgender players to be banned from women’s hockey. What they mean, of course, is that men will be banned from women's hockey. By phrasing it like that they're playing right into the hands of the trans lobby, who'll portray this as yet more anti-trans prejudice.

Transgender players will be banned from competing in women’s hockey across England from the start of next season.

In a move that follows several other sports such as tennis and golf, England Hockey announced a new transgender and non-binary participation policy on Wednesday that will move to protect “fair competition” by introducing separate female and open categories.

With transgender and non-binary players eligible to compete in only the open category, it will end transgender participation in the women’s game.

It will end male participation in the women's game. Jesus. The problem isn't the trans-ness; it's the male-ness. It's the unfair advantage of being a man competing against women.

Back to the "Islamophobia" debate. From the Times:

The definition of Islamophobia adopted by the Labour Party put “grooming gangs” in inverted commas and suggested that using the term in relation to Muslims was racist.

The wording was contained in a report by an all-party parliamentary group (APPG) of MPs co-chaired by Wes Streeting, now the health secretary.

Since March 2019, the party has adopted the “definition and examples” set out in the 2018 report, which includes a warning that “Asian grooming gangs” were a modern iteration of “age-old stereotypes and tropes about Islam”.

The document listed these as “sexual profligacy and paedophilia, or Islam and violence”, concluding that they “heighten vulnerability of Muslims to hate crimes”.

On Wednesday Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, said that, according to the APPG on British Muslims report, “talking about sex groomers was an example of Islamophobia”. She added: “This is exactly why people are scared to tell the truth.”

And why it's clear that Labour – see Starmer's claims about jumping on the "far-right" bandwagon – is not going to learn any lessons here. Hands over ears, carry on as normal. Talk of grooming gangs is "Islamophobic".

Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP who first raised concerns that white girls as young as 11 were being groomed by British-Pakistani men, said she was shouted down as a racist in meetings and that local councils “were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness”.

Claims of racism were also levelled at Andrew Norfolk, the Times investigative reporter who exposed the grooming scandal in 2011, and Sarah Champion, the MP who spoke up for victims of abuse in Rotherham.

Champion was nominated in the “Islamophobe of the year awards” in 2018 by an Islamic charity.

That's how it works. 

Iran is down but not out, while Turkey and Sunni Islam are resurgent. Much of these developments are thanks to Israeli campaigns – notably the remarkable success of their effective destruction of Hezbollah as a force in the region. What prospects, then for the year ahead? Jonathan Spyer in the JC:

With the inauguration of a new US president Israel is likely to seek support for an invigorated campaign against Iran, with the ultimate objective now being the bringing down of the Iranian regime. There is in the Israeli political and security establishment a growing conviction that the Iranian regime is currently both more vulnerable than ever before, yet potentially more dangerous.

Its vulnerability comes from the blows inflicted on it in the second half of 2024. The danger is that with its proxy strategy severely set back, Iran may turn toward other elements of power projection. The ballistic missile programme and the nuclear project are the other two components. There appears to be a widespread view in Israeli leadership circles that the new incumbent in the White House will be in agreement regarding the need for a new, forward strategy against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Whether or not that is true is likely to become apparent in the course of 2025.

It is also important to bear in mind that the main effect of diminishing Iranian power in the region over the last year, in addition to a renewed respect for and awareness of Israeli capacities and power, is the advance of Turkey. HTS’s victory in Syria was a result of the strategic acumen and Islamist commitment of Turkish President Recep Tayepp Erdogan. Ankara’s domiciling of the Syrian rebels in the northwest of the country made possible the HTS offensive.

In the year ahead, Turkey will seek to consolidate its control of Syria by entrenching HTS and Sunni Islamist control and crushing alternative centres of power in the country. The Turkish/HTS taking of Damascus is likely to lead to a resurgence of Sunni political Islam in the region. This may also lead to conflict with Shia elements, for example in the framework of the continued Shia domination of Lebanon and Iraq. Many former officials of the Assad regime have made their way to Lebanon. It is likely that they may seek to foment unrest among non-Sunni supporters of the former regime against the new rulers.

But any notion that the revival of the fortunes of Sunni Islamism represents a net gain for the West and its allies should be dismissed.

The advance of Turkey and its clients raises an alternative banner for political Islam in the region, one with in many ways greater capacity and sophistication than Iran.

It introduces a third focus of power, in addition to the Iran-led bloc, and the loose alliance of US-aligned states centred on Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

2025 will see competition between these three blocs, with the stance of the US, and the extent of its involvement, perhaps the key element that will determine the course of events. Buckle up – the ride is far from over.

As regards the new Syrian rulers – the new acceptable face of Jihad with the turbans and blood-chilling rhetoric abandoned from the old Al-Qaeda/IS days – they're making all the right noises to reassure the international community, but of course it's inevitable that suspicions remain. The 2015 video of the new Syrian Justice Minister Shadi Al-Waisi overseeing the execution of a woman for adultery is absolutely chilling (this MEMRI clip thankfully stops before the actual gunshot to the back of the head), however much he may claim that this stuff is now all behind him.

And what of the Syrian Kurds? Erdogan wants them destroyed, but they've always been allies to Israel and the West. Could they be the spark that sets off a war between Turkey and Israel?

Islamic logic from US Shiite scholar Ahmad Qazwin. At MEMRI TV:

Dearborn Heights Shiite scholar Ahmad Qazwini said at a December 13, 2024 Friday sermon at the Islamic Institute of America that it is impossible for a Muslim to lose against a Zionist on the battlefield, because the Muslim will either kill the Zionist and send him to Hell, or he will be killed by the Zionist and will go to Paradise. He said: “How can you lose? It’s a win-win situation.”

Convincing.