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Paul Willson
@pwill60
Yearning for industrial & social justice. Dislikes selfish people who lack compassion.
Joined March 2013
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“If Ukraine is burning, your Moscow will burn too” — Zelensky
“We do NOT want this war and NEVER wanted it, and everyone knows that. We certainly do NOT want Ukraine to burn because of the enemy. But if Ukraine is burning, your Moscow will burn as well.
So let me stress once again: the time has come to end this aggression, the time has come to end this war,” the Ukrainian president said.
So, let's recap, shall we?
This week the @PressClubAust managed to:
* cancel at the last minute, the questions and subsequent presence of renowned journalist Margo Kingston, who’d travelled over 2 days to Canberra to ask her question of Pauline Hanson – and yes, they were questions initially requested and organised by the Press Club itself 9 days ago.
* cancel the press gallery membership of long-term journalist, Greg Jericho, allegedly because he works for the @TheAusInstitute. Although Greg has been employed by the Aust Institute for 4 years, his membership cancellation only came yesterday after he publicly called out the Canberra press gallery - which is of course a highly fortuitous coincidence and not at all connected to his criticism.
* somehow allowed a person or persons unknown to enter the Press Club premises and put up a 3 metre wide electronic banner, without anybody in the Press Club noticing them doing it. How several people enter a private club carrying something that large, then proceed to wire it up on an open stage and nobody at the premises noticed in any way, is yet another display of the NPC’s staggering incompetence.
* release an unnecessarily detailed, high-school level statement about said banner incident, a statement that reeks of defensiveness and hysteria, while also prejudicially naming an alleged culprit and arguably sinking to the bottom of the barrel in terms of the journalistic standards it supposedly represents. Read it below and remind yourself that people who work with words for a living wrote that.
* allowed the speaker, Pauline Hanson, to defame one of their own - a journalist from the Guardian who dared to ask a hard-hitting question - by calling her "trash". This was only weeks after calling the same journalist a "nasty bitch". Mirroring, Trump’s “Quiet piggy” incident, the journalist's alleged colleagues all sat mute, as did the moderator, Tom Connell from Sky News during the abuse. No rebuke, no blow-back, no support for their fellow journalist, standing alone under Hanson's hissing vitriol. Just pusillanimous silence.
The National Press Club outdid their already dubious reputation this week, spraying themselves in a spectacular shower of self-inflicted shit – wall to wall, dripping effluent.
Australians currently suffer some of the most timid, captured political journalism in the western world, and if the actions of the #NPC this week are the metric, then we can all see why.
What a national and international embarrassment of an organisation meant to serve as a vital democratic institution and a cultural conscience – and one that has offered us neither.
.
Retweet if you think the world will be better without them
Ol’ Gutfull goes full Trump, with a savage attack on a Guardian journalist. What a nasty, whining, snarling piece of work she is.
https://t.co/m7zgjbgcZ8
Who to follow
Just a thought : maybe follow up questioners back up their colleague.
After all, there’s a lot of constant (valid) criticism of White House journalists not backing their own and the craft after Trump’s Hanson-like attacks.
SHOCKINGLY IGNORANT & VERY, VERY RUDE...
BREAKING: Iranian state media, via Reuters, says the draft memorandum with Washington commits the United States to lifting sanctions and withdrawing its forces from the vicinity of Iran. The White House calls it a fabrication, then confirms most of the substance itself.
Stay with me here, because the sequence of events deserves to be written down slowly.
In 2018, Donald Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal. The worst deal ever made, he said. Obama had shipped Iran's enriched uranium out of the country and put inspectors inside its facilities, and this, apparently, was weakness.
In February 2026, Trump went further. The opening strike was pure Caracas swagger, a decapitation operation that actually killed Iran's supreme leader on day one. Regime change, he and Netanyahu announced, urging Iranians into the streets. The regime did not change. It promoted the dead man's son and kept shooting.
Here is the detail historians will struggle with: according to Oman's foreign minister, who was mediating, Iran had already agreed to demands on dismantling its nuclear program before the bombs fell. There was a deal on the table. They bombed it.
Then came three months in which the most expensive military on earth could neither win nor leave. Trump has declared peace at hand so many times the announcements have lost exchange value. A deal largely negotiated. A breakthrough within hours. Strikes described, in his own words, as a little friendly nudge.
Meanwhile Kuwait accidentally shot down three American F-15s, an American missile destroyed a girls' school and killed at least 168 people, mostly children, which the president first blamed on Iran until the Pentagon's own investigation pointed home. Thirteen American soldiers came back in coffins.
And while Washington flailed, your life got more expensive. The Hormuz closure is the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. Inflation is climbing on every continent, rate cuts are dead, and the IMF is gaming out a global recession. The entire planet is paying interest on one man's temper.
Now the ending. The deal taking shape gives Iran sanctions relief, frozen billions and an American withdrawal from the neighborhood, while the uranium stays in Iran, under a mountain, fate to be discussed later. Which means the United States fought a fifteen-week war, at biblical expense, to arrive at a worse version of the agreement its own president destroyed for being too weak.
He did not lose to Iran. He lost to himself, eight years ago, and it took two thousand dead people to deliver the message.
Keep an eye on the signing.
Fabulous! They won’t be calling her again in a hurry…😅😂🤣
When I first got involved in politics, a comment like this from a politician would have been really big news. It’s really, really sad to me that this is now part of the mainstream debate.
Foreigners aren’t even allowed to buy existing properties in Australia.
So let’s call this what it is. Division and racism, in a country that doesn’t need any more of it.
Top African referee Omar Artan is refused access to US & will miss the 2026 World Cup.
All the other referees & officials have NOT refused to take part until he is allowed entry.
Please RT until they do.
Thank you.
Pussy ass bitch always walks out of interviews when he’s called out on his lies. Then he reverts to name calling. The good part is watching the lumbering fat fuck struggle to get out of his chair. Have I ever told you guys how much I hate this motherfucker?
The world is getting tired of this man.
Not tired in the way you get tired of a bad TV show. Tired in the way you get tired of a dog that barks at nothing, bites the postman, and then rolls over completely flat the moment someone actually pushes back. Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed master of the deal, stormed off the set of Meet the Press this morning after NBC’s Kristen Welker had the extraordinary audacity to ask him questions. Factual ones. About his own policies.
He called her “darling,” ripped off his microphone, and left.
This is the man who dodged military service with a bone spur diagnosis so convenient it might as well have come with a receipt. The man who cannot name a single foreign leader he has genuinely stood up to. The man who goes absolutely feral at female journalists and folds like a deck chair the moment Putin, Xi, or a Supreme Leader in Tehran raises an eyebrow.
His war with Iran has been a catastrophe dressed up as a victory lap. He launched it. He had no plan for the day after. He bombed things, declared triumph, and then discovered that Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz and has absolutely no intention of giving that up for free. Every deadline Trump has issued has dissolved. Every ultimatum has been quietly extended. Iran now sits on the most valuable leverage in the global economy and uses it like a cash register, adding new demands every week while the man in the White House responds with angry posts on a social media platform that fewer people use than a regional Ohio newspaper.
The last time anyone successfully negotiated a deal with Iran, it took two years, a team of the finest diplomats in the Western world, and a level of patience and precision that this administration could not locate with both hands and a map. That deal, the one Trump ripped up without apparently reading it, contained limits on uranium enrichment, inspector access, and a clear framework for walking things back. Was it perfect? No. Was it dramatically better than the current situation, in which Iran now holds the global economy by the throat ahead of the US midterms? Substantially. Embarrassingly. Obviously.
Iran is not begging for a deal. Iran is choosing between deals, slowly, while the clock runs in their favor.
Even MAGA is starting to notice. The base that cheered every bomb drop is now sitting at petrol stations and supermarket checkouts doing the maths on what this war has actually cost them. Inflation is back. Interest rates are moving. Supply chains are straining and the worst has not even arrived yet. Right now, markets are running on buffer stocks and spare capacity. The moment those warehouses empty, the real pain begins.
In the meantime, the President of the United States is storming off television sets because a journalist asked him to account for his own decisions.
The bone spurs are acting up again.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.
The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.
And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.
Record-breaking temperatures.
A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.
The response?
Yank out the instruments and walk away.
That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.
For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.
The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.
That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv
🇺🇸🤡 The Retreat of the weakest Superpower in history.
Putin did not defeat the United States militarily. He did not need to. He simply looked Trump in the eye, and Trump tucked his tail and trotted home.
On June 3rd, U.S. European Command confirmed it. A third of America’s fighter jets assigned to NATO, gone. Half its strategic bombers, gone. Submarine commitments, eliminated entirely. The Financial Times reported the cuts were more sweeping than anyone had expected.
European capitals are not panicking. They are seething. The reaction across the continent is not fear, it is contempt. Cold, quiet, lasting contempt for a man they have watched perform weakness for years and are now watching formalise it in writing. Europeans despise weakness. They have a long memory for it. And they will not forget this.
Trump is described across Europe, by serious people in serious rooms, as the most cowardly president America has ever produced. Not dangerous. Not unpredictable. Cowardly. A man who mistakes grovelling for diplomacy and calls it a deal. In Warsaw, Tallinn, Paris and Berlin the verdict is the same: America turned out to be considerably smaller than advertised. The paper tiger accusation Washington spent decades throwing at its rivals has come home. It fits perfectly.
Russia and China are not hiding their amusement. Putin did not fire a shot. He just needed Trump to perceive strength and respond the way Trump always responds to strength: with immediate, grateful submission.
American generals and admirals are furious and humiliated. Officers who spent careers building the structures that kept the peace are watching it get packed into boxes by a man who flinches when Putin clears his throat. The word used in private, repeatedly, is embarrassing.
Every soldier, sailor and general in the United States Armed Forces knows exactly what has happened here. They just cannot say it out loud. Because the man who gave the order is still in the building.
Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1
@EilishSaid @blakandblack And she loves Trump so much she tries to emulate him ergo he flies around in Airforce One and she flies around in her airfarce ( not a typo) one. Also he has orange complexion and she has orange hair. The one thing she hasn’t copied is that they’re both as dumb as each other.
Here’s a fact check of some of President Trump’s claims, including a bunch of long-debunked lies, from a single softball New York Post interview released this morning.
Claim: “We're the only country in the world that has mail-in ballots.” Truth: Dozens of countries have mail-in ballots, including Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Switzerland.
Claim: The 2020 election was “rigged” and has “been proven to be rigged.” Truth: Not rigged, there’s no proof for Trump’s assertion more than five years later, and he lost fair and square.
Claim: Trump won “three” presidential elections. Truth: He won in 2016 and 2024, lost in 2020.
Claim: In the 2024 election, “There were areas that were just rigged…rigged against me.” Truth: Nonsense again; he won that election fair and square but lost some areas of the country fair and square.
Claim: Democrats “could not win” “if they didn’t cheat.” Truth: Democrats, like Republicans, clearly win various elections legitimately.
Claim: California mails out “38 million ballots," and while "some people get three, four, five ballots," "Republicans get, oftentimes, none.” Truth: California mails a ballot to all active registered voters, of which there are 23 million, not the “38 million” figure Trump has used repeatedly; while there are occasional errors by county elections offices and the postal service, there's no general anti-Republican bias in ballot-mailing in the state.
Claim: “I inherited the highest inflation in the history of our country…Biden had like 9, 10% inflation. And I inherited that, and we have it way down.” Truth: The inflation rate the month Trump returned to office was 3.0%, lower than the most recent rate of 3.8%; Biden-era inflation did peak at 9.1%, but that was in mid-2022, and it wasn’t close to the all-time record of 23.7%. Regardless, it had fallen substantially before Trump’s inauguration.
Claim: “We have $18 trillion being invested in the country in just 11 months.” Truth: This is a completely fictional figure. The White House’s own website says there have been $10.6 trillion in “major investment announcements” this term, and even that’s a massive exaggeration that counts vague pledges, not-even-pledges, and pledges that are about mutual trade rather than investments in the US.
Claim: Trump had gas prices at “$1.85 in Iowa” on the day he visited there in January. Truth: The Iowa average gas price that day was $2.57 per gallon, per AAA; GasBuddy found four stations in the state out of 2,036 selling for $1.97 that day, none at $1.85; the station outside the venue where he spoke was at $2.69. (Ethanol-gas blend E85 was around $1.85, but that can only be used in a small percentage of cars, and he didn’t say that was what he was talking about.)
Claim: Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was still wearing a mask “a couple of months ago.” Truth: I've found no evidence for this; the Talarico video many Republicans have mocked shows Talarico wearing a mask in 2022, not 2026.
Claim: Mitch McConnell was “losing by a lot” in the 2020 Senate election in Kentucky but then Trump endorsed him and got him elected. Truth: McConnell, running in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992, led in all but one public poll in that race, and that one exception was a poll conducted for a pro-term-limits group in which he trailed by just one point; he was always the overwhelming favorite.
Claim: The Jan. 6 attack was “nonsense” in which “the FBI said, ‘Go in. Go in.’” Truth: That was a riot perpetrated by Trump supporters, and there's no evidence the FBI ever told rioters to illegally enter the Capitol. DOJ’s inspector general found the FBI had zero undercover agents at the riot…and Trump was president at the time and had personally appointed the FBI director.
Claim: Former VP Harris “was the border czar” but “never went.” Truth: She went to the border twice as VP, and the Biden administration repeatedly emphasized she was never “border czar” but had a narrower assignment focused on the “root causes” of migration from Central America.
Claim: Under Biden, “25 million people” poured over the border. Truth: This is a further exaggeration from the wildly exaggerated “21 million” figure Trump used to use; even counting “gotaways,” it’s not even close to correct.
Claim: Democrats are so dumb that “we had 11,888 murderers, most of whom committed more than one murder, allowed into our country.” Truth: The federal data it appears Trump is referring to is about people who entered the US over the course of multiple decades, *including during Trump’s own first administration.*
Claim: Under Biden, countries emptied their jail populations into the US – “the whole jail was emptied into our country.” Trump and his team have never substantiated this claim even though he’s made it for years, and experts on global prison policy and on the countries he has previously identified as the supposed culprits have told me they’ve seen no evidence for it.
More details: https://t.co/NtFk7PUfwN
People keep asking me what America is actually capable of, now that it has driven away every ally it has. The answer is not hypothetical. It is the Persian Gulf, right now.
Iran is a nation of 90 million people sitting on a mountain range that runs the entire length of its borders. Its military infrastructure is buried inside those mountains. Command centers, missile batteries, fuel depots, weapons production, all of it underground and dispersed across a country roughly the size of Western Europe. Operation Epic Fury struck approximately 6,000 targets.
Iran is still firing.
The Strait of Hormuz has been closed since late February. A quarter of the world’s daily oil supply has nowhere to go. The entrance is mined, patrolled and locked. And the most expensive military in human history is sitting outside it, unable to go in.
This is the moment to be honest about what America is missing.
Europe operates roughly 10,000 military aircraft. Not little propeller trainers. More than ten thousand combat-capable jets that would immediately transform the air campaign over the Gulf, free up American assets for the deep-penetration mountain missions that actually matter, and sustain an operational tempo no single nation can manage alone.
Britain fields two aircraft carriers and seven nuclear-armed hunter-killer submarines. France brings a nuclear carrier, fifteen frigates and its own nuclear submarine fleet. Belgium and the Netherlands operate the finest mine countermeasure vessels on earth, built specifically for strait-clearing operations of exactly this kind. Italy contributes two carriers and eight FREMM frigates. Poland has the largest land army in Europe. Norway has completed its conversion to the F-35 and fields fifty-two of them.
The map below shows some capabilities in Europe, but It represents only a fraction of what Europe actually has. It does not include Finland, Sweden, Spain, Romania, Greece or Portugal, each of which contributes substantial air power, naval tonnage and ground forces of their own. The full picture is considerably larger than what fits on one page.
And then there is Ukraine. Four years of industrial-scale warfare have produced the most battle-tested drone force in existence. Autonomous strike systems, mass swarm tactics and electronic warfare capabilities developed under live fire at a pace no peacetime military can replicate. An allied force with Ukrainian drone expertise integrated into it would look fundamentally different over the mountains of Iran than what America has there now.
European intelligence services have human networks inside Iran and across the Gulf that no satellite can replace. Germany and France maintained functioning diplomatic back-channels into Tehran until late 2025. That kind of quiet credibility is the difference between a negotiated shipping corridor and a permanent blockade. It cannot be improvised. It cannot be bombed into existence.
None of this is available, because Washington spent years treating its allies as freeloaders, adversaries and negotiating targets, and then went to war expecting the same loyalty it had spent years deliberately destroying.
The alliance built after 1945 was never charity. It was a force multiplier that no defense budget, however grotesque in size, can replace on its own. America is learning that now, at roughly a hundred million dollars per day in operational costs, with the strait still closed and the oil still not moving.
Trump was not acting in America’s interest. He was acting in the interest of a man who has never in his life had to live with the consequences of his own decisions. America is living with them now.
Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1
Another confusing, incoherent and bewildering interview on the AUKUS fiasco from Richard Marles on ABC 7.30.
No straight answers, no final cost, no delivery dates and no guarantees of ever getting a sub.
This is a major political and strategic weakness for the ALP government!
Sally McManus nails None Nation
"One Nation. Every single time they vote against workers' rights, they back the billionaire, not the Aussie worker."
So, the cookers think Pauline Hanson is on their side. Her actions show she's NOT.
Transcript:
Let me tell you a story about One Nation. Up until a few years ago, big business were using a huge rort to cut the pay of Australian workers. It was labour hire. What they did is they employed people in labour hire companies and bought them in, and they were doing exactly the same job as the permanent staff, but they paid them less. Big mining companies<<< did it all over the country, so workers in regional communities missed out on secure, well-paid jobs as a result.
Qantas did it too. They set up a whole bunch of labour hire companies and used external labour hire companies to employ flight attendants and pay them less, all so they could cut the pay of Aussie workers. Unions fought for decades to shut down this big business loophole, and in 2023, labor passed laws that brought this rort to an end.
Bosses across the country were forced to abandon labour hire and employ people directly or raise their pay, and the result? Big pay rises for lots of workers, including mine workers which directly benefit mining communities, and for flight attendants who can now afford the rent in big cities.
And guess who voted against it?
That's right, One Nation. Every single time they vote against workers' rights, they back the billionaire, not the Aussie worker.
_________________
Wake up cookers.
I don't understand this whole growing thing in Oz politics, about being "patriots" & embracing "freedom".
Far from being patriotic, it feels like warmed over MAGA nonsense that wont pull in anyone who isn't already there?
The quote is from Tony Abbott who's just become Lib Prez.
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