Garry G

Future Trader/ Financial Adviser

[Eli Afriat 🇮🇱 @EliAfriatISR]

Maj. Vitaliy Karsik was an Israel Police officer who secured the Nova music festival on October 7.

When the first dozens of terrorists arrived at the party site, it was immediately clear that they were armed to the teeth with Kalashnikovs, machine guns, hand grenades, RPGs, improvised explosive devices, and endless rounds and rockets.

Karsik was armed only with a pistol, but he was one of the first to make contact with them.

He was a brave young man, a fearless fighter according to his friends, but also intelligent. Therefore, he understood that he probably did not survive the battle, and that his mission at the moment was a containment mission. To make contact and cut through the terrorists and the thousands of revelers with his body, his pistol, and his few bullets, in order to buy the revelers time, the precious golden minutes, to escape to the open areas and be saved.

And so it was. Instead of correctly assessing the balance of power and joining the fleeing revelers, or at least To secure them in their flight, a humane and understandable act, he showed unsurpassed magnanimity and was one of the first to give up his own life for them and strive for contact.

He advanced towards the terrorists and began to engage in a gunfight with them, with the aim of preventing them from closing the short distance between them and the thousands of revelers who were still crowded in the center of the party.

During the battle, he was hit by the terrorists' gunfire and killed.

Vitaly used to say to his family and friends - "I am ready to give my head for the country."

He was indeed ready and he did give.

In his memory.

[Alan Shatter @Alan__Shatter]

Irelands new ambassador to Iran reportedly presented his credentials to Iran’s President this week & was lectured about Iran’s concern about the violation of human rights & reportedly responded with predictable diplomatic inanities.
The Taoiseach fraudulently claimed Ireland was going to make human rights & the rule of law central to our EU presidency. Ireland is the EU’s appointed interlocutor with Iran during the presidency . Totally silent on the daily barbaric executions in Iran & no reported criticism by our ambassador or our government . Why?

[Philip Dwyer @PhilipDwyer_MOI]

Shocking footage.... African driver runs over pedestrian in Ballyjamesduff County Cavan... drives away after bystanders try to save his victim nearly killing others. Shocking footage.

[Handre @Handre]

Joseph Stalin murdered more human beings than almost anyone in recorded history, and he did it with a clipboard and a five-year plan.

Let me give you the numbers, because the numbers matter. The Holodomor, the man-made famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, killed somewhere around 4 million people. Stalin engineered it. He confiscated the grain, sealed the borders so starving peasants couldn't leave, and let them die in the snow while the state exported wheat abroad.

He collectivized agriculture, meaning he seized private farms and forced peasants onto giant state operations. The productive farmers, the ones who owned a cow or two and actually knew how to grow things, he branded "kulaks" and shipped to Siberia or shot. He destroyed his best producers on purpose.

Then came the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. Stalin's secret police executed roughly 700,000 people in about two years. Not battlefield deaths. Confessions extracted in basements, quotas handed down for how many "enemies" each region should find.

Quotas. For arrests. Somebody in Moscow decided your town owed the state 200 traitors, and the local officers went and found 200, guilty or not.

The whole thing rests on a simple lie: that a handful of men in a Kremlin office know how to run millions of lives better than those millions running their own. Stalin believed that lie hard enough to build a machine of corpses around it.

Property rights aren't some dusty legal technicality. They're the thing standing between you and a bureaucrat deciding your grain belongs to the collective and your life doesn't matter.

Stalin proved that 20 million dead is just a statistic to a central planner.

[Handre @Handre]

In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat published his essay "Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas," and in doing so handed you the sharpest tool you will ever own for dismantling economic nonsense.

Picture the scene he paints. A shopkeeper's careless son smashes a pane of glass. The crowd gathers, clucks its tongue, and then a helpful bystander offers consolation: think of the glazier who now earns six francs. Think of the money circulating. Think of the boost to industry. If nobody ever broke a window, whatever would the glaziers do?

You have heard this exact argument your entire life, dressed in nicer clothes.

Bastiat's genius was to insist you count what you do not see. Yes, the glazier earns six francs. That much is visible. But the shopkeeper intended to buy new shoes, or a book, or to save the money and lend it out. That transaction never happens now. The glazier gains what the cobbler loses. Society is down one pane of glass and no richer for it. Destruction creates activity, never wealth.

The lineage runs straight to Henry Hazlitt, who opened his great book "Economics in One Lesson" in 1946 with the broken window and built an entire treatise on the discipline of tracing consequences to everyone, not merely the man holding the six francs. Read that book once and you become immune to roughly ninety percent of what passes for economic commentary.

Watch how governments love the smashed pane. After the September 11 attacks, credentialed economists appeared on television to explain that rebuilding would stimulate the economy. Paul Krugman wrote as much. Every war, every hurricane, every demolished neighborhood summons the same chorus: destruction is good for GDP. Of course it is good for the crude accounting fiction of GDP, which counts the glazier's six francs and stays silent about the shoes.

Here is where the state reveals itself. It cannot create the six francs. It can only smash your window, hand the money to a favored glazier, and demand your gratitude for the employment. Taxation is the rock through the pane, laundered through legislation.

Bastiat saw the whole racket in 1850. Your credentialed economists still cannot.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

As I always say, enjoy talking about socialism now, because once you have it your opinion won’t matter anymore.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

He told his students to go to the windows.
Get out. Jump if you have to.
Then Liviu Librescu walked to the classroom door and pressed his body against it.
He was 76 years old. He weighed 140 lbs
The gunman was in the hallway.
It was April 16, 2007. A Monday morning. Solid mechanics class at Virginia Tech, Room 204. Twenty-two students, most of them 19 or 20 years old.
At 9:45 AM, gunshots echoed through Norris Hall. Room by room, the shooter was working his way down the corridor.
Liviu heard it. He understood immediately.
He had survived the Holocaust. He had survived a labor camp. He had spent decades living under Communist oppression. He knew exactly what evil sounded like.
He told his students to escape through the windows. Second floor — it was a drop, but they'd survive. Then he walked to the door and held it shut with his body.
The shooter tried to force it open. It wouldn't move.
He fired through the door. Wood splintered. Bullets came through.
Liviu stayed.
Behind him, students were climbing out the windows. Dropping to the ground. Running. One by one, all twenty-two of them got out.
The shooter kept firing through the door.
Liviu held it shut until every student was safe.
Then the bullets killed him.
When police arrived, they found his body at the door.
All 22 of his students survived. Not one was injured.
Liviu Librescu was born on August 18, 1930, in Ploiești, Romania.
He was Jewish. In 1941, when he was eleven years old, Romanian authorities sent him and his family to a labor camp. His father died there. Liviu survived. When the war ended, he was fifteen.
He went back to school. Studied engineering. Earned a doctorate from the University of Bucharest.
But Communist Romania had no interest in allowing a Jewish intellectual to succeed. He was blocked from academic positions. Passed over for jobs he deserved. He applied to emigrate. The government kept refusing.
Finally, in 1978 when Liviu was 48 years old — Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened. Romania let him go.
He had spent most of his adult life trapped in a country that didn't want him.
In Israel, he taught at Tel Aviv University. Published over 300 papers. Became an international expert in aeroelasticity — the science of how air flows over aircraft wings.
In 1985, Virginia Tech offered him a position. He moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. He taught there for 22 years. His students loved him — demanding but kind, high standards, genuine care.
He was still teaching full-time at 76. Still publishing research. Still showing up every Monday morning for solid mechanics.
April 16 was the first day of Passover — the Jewish holiday celebrating liberation from slavery and oppression.
Liviu Librescu died on the day his tradition sets aside to celebrate freedom.
He spent his entire life escaping death and oppression by luck, by persistence, by the intervention of others. And on his last morning, he chose to stand at a door so that twenty-two young people could have the future he had fought so hard to reach.
He could have run. He could have hidden. He could have climbed out a window with his students.
He chose to stay.
The Virginia Tech shooting killed 32 people that day — the deadliest school shooting in American history at the time.
Room 204 had zero casualties.
Because a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor held a door with his body until every student behind him was gone.
His funeral was held in Israel. Students from Virginia Tech flew across the ocean to honor him. The Israeli government awarded him the Star of David Medal posthumously. Virginia Tech named a scholarship in his memory.
His son said his father died the way he lived — protecting others.
A man who survived everything evil threw at him for 76 years.
On his last day, he made sure 22 kids survived too.
Professor Liviu Librescu. August 18, 1930 — April 16, 2007.
Holocaust survivor. Labor camp survivor.
302 published papers. 22 years at Virginia Tech.
22 students out the window.
He held the door.

[gript @griptmedia]

KEVIN MYERS: The absence of any immediate public outrage at the brutal murder of Ann Widdecombe - including the apparent silence of King Charles and the failure of House of Commons to suspend business - indicates that England is in dire trouble.

https://t.co/0esYfdydTW

[RadioGenoa @RadioGenoa]

General Roberto Vannacci declares war on Islam: "I don't want to wake up tomorrow to see crowds of people praying to Allah in Milan's Piazza del Duomo. Italian schools must not close for Ramadan, and I don't want mosques in schools." Every sensible Italian should vote for him.

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

The goal of my entire career as an historian was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history—including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state. Yet today, as AI permeates social networks, anti-history is spreading like a cancer. The Holocaust is either denied or derided. I have to admit: I failed utterly.

[Garry G @TheVillager4]

Unbelievable

[gript @griptmedia]

An FOI request has revealed that 116,000 animals were slaughtered in Ireland without being stunned, under exemptions provided for Halal and other forms of non-stun slaughtering of livestock.

https://t.co/fABs83PVpu

[Handre @Handre]

Sweden got rich under laissez-faire and nearly wrecked itself trying to forget it. Between 1870 and 1970, Sweden ran one of the freest economies in Europe: low taxes, open trade, sound money, and entrepreneurs like the Wallenbergs and Ingvar Kamprad building world-class firms. By 1970 Sweden ranked fourth in OECD per capita income. Then the social democrats decided prosperity was automatic and started spending it.

You know what happened next if you understand incentives. Government spending blew past 60 percent of GDP by the late 1980s. Marginal tax rates crossed 85 percent. In 1976 Astrid Lindgren, the children's author, calculated her effective marginal rate at 102 percent and wrote a satirical fairy tale about it in Expressen. She paid the state more than she earned. Not a single new net private-sector job appeared between 1950 and 1990. Every job added came from the public payroll. Capital fled, IKEA's ownership moved offshore, and by 1993 Sweden had slid to roughly 14th in the OECD income rankings.

The 1991-93 crisis forced honesty. The krona collapsed, interest rates briefly hit 500 percent, and the political class ran out of other people's money in real time. What followed was one of the sharpest market-oriented turnarounds in modern history. Carl Bildt's government introduced universal school vouchers in 1992, letting for-profit schools compete for every student. Sweden partially privatized pensions in 1998 with individual investment accounts. It deregulated taxis, rail, telecom, postal services, and electricity. It abolished the inheritance tax in 2004 and the wealth tax in 2007. Corporate tax fell from 52 percent to 20.6 percent. Spending dropped nearly 20 points of GDP.

Notice what you never hear from the "democratic socialism" crowd: Sweden's welfare state produced stagnation. Its recovery came from cutting, privatizing, and deregulating. Bernie Sanders praises a country that killed its estate tax while he campaigns to raise yours. The lesson free market economists have taught for a century holds here perfectly. Wealth comes from capital accumulation and voluntary exchange. Redistribution consumes it. Sweden ran the experiment twice, in both directions, on live television.

The Swedes learned. The question is whether you will before your own government runs the same experiment.

[Sinéad O’Sullivan @SineadOS1]

Why can't Ireland just DO stuff?

My latest: Ireland's Delivery Inability.

In which I look at the gap between record input highs of money and the size of Ireland's government against record output lows of ...nothing.

[Pierre Rehov @rehoov]

"Avant de quitter mon poste de chef des services de renseignements roumains pour l'Amérique, j'étais chargé de remettre à Arafat environ 200 000 dollars en espèces blanchies chaque mois pendant les années 1970. J'envoyais également deux avions-cargos à Beyrouth par semaine, remplis d'uniformes et de fournitures. D'autres États du bloc soviétique ont fait à peu près la même chose....
On m'a remis le « dossier personnel » du KGB sur Arafat. C'était un bourgeois égyptien transformé en marxiste dévoué par les services de renseignements étrangers du KGB. Le KGB l'avait formé à son école d'opérations spéciales de Balashikha, à l'est de Moscou, et avait décidé, au milieu des années 60, de le préparer à devenir le futur chef de l'OLP. Tout d'abord, le KGB a détruit les registres officiels de la naissance d'Arafat au Caire et les a remplacés par des documents fictifs indiquant qu'il était né à Jérusalem et qu'il était donc Palestinien de naissance.
Le département de désinformation du KGB a ensuite travaillé sur le tract de quatre pages d'Arafat intitulé « Falastinuna » (Notre Palestine), le transformant en un magazine mensuel de 48 pages pour l'organisation terroriste palestinienne al-Fatah. Arafat dirigeait al-Fatah depuis 1957. Le KGB le distribue dans tout le monde arabe et en Allemagne de l'Ouest, qui accueille à l'époque de nombreux étudiants palestiniens....
Arafat était un agent secret important pour le KGB. Juste après la guerre israélo-arabe des six jours de 1967, Moscou l'a nommé président de l'OLP. C'est le dirigeant égyptien Gamal Abdel Nasser, une marionnette soviétique, qui a proposé cette nomination. En 1969, le KGB a demandé à Arafat de déclarer la guerre au « sionisme impérial » américain lors du premier sommet de l'Internationale du terrorisme noir, une organisation néo-fasciste pro-palestinienne financée par le KGB et le Libyen Moammar Kadhafi. Le cri de guerre impérialo-sioniste a tellement plu à Arafat qu'il a prétendu plus tard l'avoir inventé. Mais en fait, le « sionisme impérial » est une invention de Moscou, une adaptation moderne des « Protocoles des Sages de Sion », et depuis longtemps l'outil favori des services secrets russes pour fomenter la haine ethnique. Le KGB a toujours considéré l'antisémitisme et l'anti-impérialisme comme une source abondante d'anti-américanisme....
En mars 1978, j'ai secrètement amené Arafat à Bucarest pour qu'il reçoive les dernières instructions sur la façon de se comporter à Washington. « Vous n'avez qu'à continuer à prétendre que vous allez rompre avec le terrorisme et que vous allez reconnaître Israël - encore et encore et encore », lui a dit Ceausescu pour la énième fois.... " (M. Pacepa est l'officier de renseignement le plus haut gradé à avoir fait défection de l'ancien bloc soviétique. Auteur de « Red Horizons » (Regnery, 1987)

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

A very gracious and actually touching goodbye from Keir Starmer, his departure a demonstration of public service, orderly democratic succession accepted with honourable dignity, good humour (and personal hurt impossible to hide and family love for his admirable wife proudly declared) his reign a cautionary tale of transient power, partisan obstruction, tribal parochialism, intimate betrayal and ideological santimony typical of the shortsightnedness, shallow entitlement and self mutilation that are now traits of politics in a comfort democracy and legacy power - all this cheered by the MPs, the personification of humbug who undermined his small but essential measures of reform and progress, betrayed him fast and turned all too quickly to the flash of what they hoped was a rising sun....

[Senator Rónán Mullen @RonanMullen]

Mass for Ann Widdecombe in St Teresa’s Church, Clarendon St, Dublin tomorrow, Wednesday 15th July at 12.45 p.m. All are welcome. Please forward.

Ann visited Leinster House in June 2015 at the invitation of the Oireachtas Human Dignity Group and addressed a number of TDs and Senators.

All who met her could only be taken by her honesty, integrity, wit and sense of fun.

May she rest in peace.

[Declan Ganley @declanganley]

This was flagged to me right after the commissioning of the 64th Naval Cadet Class, Irish Navy. Neither the Minister for Defence, nor a deputy minister bothered to attend. A civil servant came instead, to represent the minister. The minister was away at a conference, not sure what more pressing engagements the deputy ministers had. Then they wonder why morale and retention is a problem for the Navy and Defence Forces.
I know that this minister and her deputies genuinely just don't get it, don't understand why the commissioning of your military officers is a 'must attend'. It has no meaning for them, they don't identify with it, nor with the military. This was a profound mark of disrespect, so much so that I wasn't even sure I should draw attention to it. As a country, its just not serious, it's embarrassing but on top of that, it's downright insulting.