Rick Somerton

@DrRitaDed You’re students? You said you are on benefits.

My students will not be doing any Easter related tasks this year. Chicken eggs are literally baby chickens you monsters are using as a prompt for a fake day. Egg shaped chocolate is just as bad as it teaches kids killing animals is okay. I'm teaching then while they're young.

@DrRitaDed You can have an opinion. That does not make it right.

If you don't have a PhD what gives you the right to even debate any of my views? My friends are I are the authority on Gender issues. Keep your bigotry and transphobia to yourself.

@MaryKostakidis Yeah nah. Do you think nice letter writing excuses Iran for the hundreds of thousand last of its own people it has killed and all of the terrorist activities it has supported globally?

Commentary and full text of Iran’s open letter ‘You don’t have to agree with Iran on everything. You don’t have to like their government. But when the country you’re bombing writes a more coherent, more historically literate, and more strategically sound letter than anything your own president has ever produced, maybe it’s time to ask who the real adults in the room are.’ ifloz.substack.com/p/iran-just-wr…

@S_GerardRennick No. It’s bs

Daily tradition or too much? 🇦🇺 “Welcome to Country” ceremonies are an important part of recognizing Indigenous heritage and culture in Australia 🇦🇺 Some believe including it in schools helps build respect, understanding, and unity from a young age.

@joni_askola Yeah cause free speech is a huge threat.

Musk really had it all: He could have been one of the coolest guys on the planet if he had just stayed a goofy tech and space billionaire. Instead, he chose to back fascism and become a threat to democracy

@otokyo__ Schindlers list.

I don’t want your “best movie ever.” I want the one that made you sit in silence when the credits rolled. The one where you said, “what… was that?” No spoilers. Just titles. Let’s ruin my week.

@lady_valor_07 Easy.

Singer P!nk calls MAGA an “insult to humanity” and says, “If you’re a Trump supporter, then don’t listen to my music.” What is your Response to her ??

@Heccles94 And yet people still work there.

Tesla doesn't recongise Trade Unions. Apple doesn't recognise unions. Amazon is anti-union. McDonald's is anti-union. Starbucks is anti-union. Google is anti-union. Walmart is anti-union. These mega businesses are not on your side.

@elonmusk When is it coming

My idea of a good time is working with amazing engineers to create incredible technology 🤩 The Tesla chip research fab will have all the machines needed to do logic, memory, packing & masks in one building for a lightning fast development cycle. Heaven 💫

@cheryl_kernot Oh my I just heard you go off as if you are an expert. Tell us the real story then. See if you know it better.

OMG I just sat with an Australian Trump devotee & “chatted” for half an hour. It was so scary hearing the history of Israel & Palestine as he has read it & quoted. And he was outright “I hate Islam & Muslims who practise it.” Haven’t experienced any of this for quite a while. 🤔

@JaneCaro That is just a stupid statement. It won’t happen. You just blather without making any contribution.

If a Prime Minister in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK behaved like Trump he would lose the confidence of the House and be out. The US needs to stop its cultish worship of its constitution & founding fathers & create a system that will never allow another wannabe dictator.

@NormalIslandNws Oh. That’s good the Iranians won’t be hiding behind women and children. Good to know makes it easier

BREAKING: Israel has confirmed its soldiers will not be joining the US in the ground invasion of Iran, due to the concern that they would have to fight grown men, rather than unarmed women and children

@BanishedFree @Gandalf_da_Grey @DrJStrategy Yes you cringe because you when he shy talks is makes it harder to defend his very sound actions. I feel the same way.

@Gandalf_da_Grey @DrJStrategy Biden was a moron. Trump makes me pull my hair out everyday. I cringe every time he tweets. He's painful to watch sometimes. But President Trump has my FULL RESPECT for actually taking on Iran and ending their constant menace in the world. Ditto his achievements in Venezuela.

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

@Gandalf_da_Grey @DrJStrategy He had been talking about these things for40 years. He is tired of the hangers on who pontificate and look down their nose at Americans. The Germans laughed when he told them they were fools to rely on Russian energy.

This is very interesting thesis but has one big flaw: Trump is a moron and isn’t thinking about any of that. He is vain, self centered, greedy, thin skinned, and extremely emotional with no discipline or self control. He’s just going off his gut feelings and then reacting to what the Iranians (and to a lesser extent, the Israelis) are doing. He’s not playing 4D chess, he’s putting the pieces in his mouth. And before the MAGA cultists show up ask about Biden, yes, I also thought he was a moron.

@kiddwikked @elonmusk Where is the BS?

@elonmusk For fucks sake, you're just a megaphone for maga bullshit at this point

Wow

@PecanC8 Halloween? Darth Vader reincarnated as a beekeeper.

First thought when you see this?

@cmdibley You might find the lack of supply is down to stupid Australian. Firstly panic buying and secondly having no foresight in allowing refineries to close.

Hey Americans on here chiding us in other countries for criticising Trump: he is our business. Petrol in Australia is in short supply & currently costs $2.48 p/l (that’s $9.37 p/gallon.) We didn’t bomb Iran. We are all suffering because of your stupid President.

@thehealthb0t They must be dropping like flies in the US.

Terminator director James Cameron says he no longer wants to live around unvaccinated Americans and has permanently moved to New Zealand. Cameron says New Zealanders are “sane” with their 98% vaccination rate, while the U.S. is a “country falling behind” as more Americans reject science. “They already had a 98% vaccination rate. This is why I love New Zealand.”

@DrewPavlou Sounds like a good plan.

BREAKING: Australian Immigration Minister Tony Burke just gave a visa to Bengali jihadist preacher Mizanur Rahman Azhari to speak on an Australian tour. Azhari has praised Hitler as “divine punishment” against the Jews, accusing them of being behind the invention of AIDS. Azhari’s speaking tour began in Brisbane on Monday night at the Islamic College of Brisbane. He is scheduled to continue in Melbourne on April 3, Sydney April 4, and Canberra April 6.  Breaking story by @ncominoau at Daily Mail.

@mark16pg Thought it was satire and then saw the punchline.