Hok Mo

Ghost in a Wishing Well ... 'Gordon Lightfoot'

[StarBoySAR 🇭🇰 🇨🇳 🥭 @StarboySAR]

Brilliant piece from Pearls and Irritations. Finally, someone in Australia is saying out loud what the rest of us have been watching for the past five years

Let's be clear about what AUKUS actually is: the greatest military protection racket in modern history. Washington looked at its own crippled submarine industrial base—17 boats short, yards choking, Congress screaming—and found the perfect mark. A wealthy, eager, insecure middle power with a bipartisan fetish for great-power relevance and a defense minister who treats strategic questions like a classified state secret

The deal? Australia pays half a trillion dollars. In return, it gets used Virginia-class hand-me-downs—Block IV boats with a decade of wear already on the hulls, probably smelling faintly of its previous crew

Even more intriguing, the article confirms for what this overpriced second-hand Australian "sovereign" nuclear submarine fleet is actually for:

Hunting Chinese Jin-class and Type 096 SSBNs. Not to protect Sydney Harbour. Not to secure Australia's trade routes. To find, track, and if ordered, destroy the Chinese nuclear submarines that threaten continental America!

That's the job. That's the whole job. Australia just committed A$368 billion to be the US Navy's underwater security guard!

The comedy of "sovereign capability" is almost too rich. Sovereign? The reactors are American. The combat system is American. The weapons are American. The fuel is American. The intelligence feed is American. The maintenance schedule is American. Permanently tethering Australia to U.S. software, maintenance, and logistics, effectively ending any "sovereign" capability. The only thing Australian is the taxpayer—and the Prime Minister standing in front of a camera calling this independence

Australia is not buying a submarine; it is buying a node in a U.S. sensor network. The acquisition deeply integrates Australia into the U.S. military command structure, making Australia a tool for U.S. strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific — while a massive amount of Australian wealth is transferred into the U.S. military-industrial complex

And the timing is exquisite. Washington just added another half-trillion to its own defense budget while Australia is told to hit 3.5% of GDP. America gets the money, the boats, the basing rights at HMAS Stirling, and a Pacific ASW auxiliary. Australia gets the bill, the dependency, and the warm fuzzy feeling of being taken seriously by the adults.

The U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) emphasizes "burden-sharing among allies" and "realist diplomacy." This submarine deal is the perfect execution of that strategy: the U.S. maintains its military overmatch against China by essentially "outsourcing" the financial cost of undersea surveillance to Australia 🤡

Paul Keating called this three years ago. He was mocked, of course. The press club gasped. The security establishment rolled its eyes. But he was right then, and this article proves he's right now. It is worse than he thought. It's not that AUKUS is of little military benefit to Australia. It's that AUKUS is of negative military benefit to Australia—actively diverting resources from actual defense needs toward a capability designed for someone else's homeland

https://t.co/f7lYAMf3JY

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

There has never been a war in history where 80% of the country has been destroyed, 100% of the population displaced, and 50% of the deaths children.

Call it what it is: GENOCIDE.

[Toniop @Otisgrrr]

@sahouraxo This has to stop. The UN or any international organization should sanction Israel and convene a court for crimes against humanity. Undoubtedly Israel will be found guilty. An international force should then rid us of this vile excuse of an army. Future generations will judge us.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

This is who Israel killed in Beirut today:

A 3-month-old baby girl.

Israel killed her, and killed her mother, Fatima Wehbi, dropping a bomb on a residential building in Lebanon’s capital.

[Ariel Marrero Aguilar @ArielMA1963]

Para ocultar esto asesinan inocentes, secuestran presidentes, amenazan países e incluso hasta piensan en el uso de las armas atómicas. Nada de eso impedirá que el mundo lo siga acusando de Pedófilo.

[Middle East Eye @MiddleEastEye]

“Four young teenage boys were brought in, all of whom had been shot in the testicles.”

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who has worked repeatedly in Gaza since 2010, describes a pattern of shootings at food distribution points where children were shot in specific body parts on different days.

“The pattern of injuries that we all witnessed was so striking, that it was it was clearly beyond coincidental, and it seemed to us that there was a game of target practice.”

He also details quadcopters hovering over tents and spraying bullets indiscriminately, and recounts the death of six neonates left in incubators at Al-Nasr pediatric hospital after Israeli forces evacuated the hospital and left them to rot.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

This isn’t an apocalyptic film.

This is Tyre, South Lebanon, today.

A 5,000-year-old city.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Israel is wiping it out.

Turning one of humanity’s oldest cities into ash.

This is the destruction of civilization itself — unfolding in real time.

[MO @Abu_Salah9]

فضيحة تاريخية يجب أن يشاهدها العالم أجمع

الوزير الإسرائيلي يُخاطب الجنود الإسرائيليين قبل دخولهم غزة قائلاً: "أمسكوا بالأطفال الرضع في غزة وحطموا رؤوسهم على الصخور"

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

The U.S. is starving and killing babies in Cuba, and the media is staying silent about it.

The U.S. is starving Cuba like Israel is starving Gaza.

This's a criminal act of collective punishment. This’s a crime against humanity. And no one is talking about it.

[Helen Mac 🍉🎒 @LoveCrochet6]

@Wendy_Bacon @JohnRowsthorne The pro IL will stop at nothing until all their demands are met. And the Albanese Labor gov is happy to oblige. Just look to the largesse afforded them in the Budget. Buildings of learning & education flattened in Gaza & not a wimp from this gov.

[Its Time @pangolincovid]

@Wendy_Bacon Do most Australians realise that we are to them no different from Palestinians

[Wendy Bacon @Wendy_Bacon]

Do most Australians even realise that their universities are being threatened with funding cuts if they do not fall into line with the pro Israel lobby goal of silencing critics of Israel? - its an outrageous threat to academic freedom

[Hok Mo @HokMo2]

Israeli forces open fire at Global Sumud Flotilla boat https://t.co/8QA2rBHfl2 via @YouTube

[Doug Cameron @DougCameron51]

APAN, the voice of the Palestinian community in Australia has been refused leave appear at the RC on antisemitism and social cohesion.
Denying Palestinian Australians who have had relatives slaughtered in the Israeli genocide in Gaza is a denial of natural justice,

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

Errors, rumours, exaggerations and plain untruths going unchallenged at the Bondi RC. The mainstream media should be reporting this, but they are demonstrably failing, falling down on the job. For whatever reason.

[Iranian Force @MrImranPk]

Dear followers

My account is currently under a coordinated mass-reporting campaign to silence it.
If you believe what I share deserves to stay, I need your support now:

Engage, repost, and speak the truth.
Your voice is the real protection.

Don’t leave me alone in facing this targeting.

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

She doesn’t have a clue. Not. One. Fucking. Clue. The economic knowledge of a garden snail.

[csb (Cate & The Whole Catastrophe) @csb02174941]

@strangerous10 Thank goodness we have a Jim & not a Tim.

[stranger @strangerous10]

it was humiliating from beginning to end, Wilson looked shaky, out of his depth, & said his increasingly irrelevant Liberal Party will do what they always do and vote No to everything. 🙄

[stranger @strangerous10]

Sarah Ferguson humiliates Tim Wilson who can’t stop looking at his talking points.
“When you talk about ‘honesty’, do you need to read that off your notes?”🔥
Total car crash. He can’t even find the truth without a cheat sheet. #auspol