Jonathan Mears

Look at these flags flying outside NZ Parliament today! These are the five flags for IDAHOBIT Day - International Day Against (supposedly) Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism, and Transphobia. IDAHOBIT Day is 17 May, so are these flags going to be flying for 4 or 5 days just to mark ONE day? I'm guessing that Pink Shirt Day probably comes into it as well, because there can never be enough virtue-signalling. What the actual heck does Parliament fly these flags for? I was told that they probably weren't going to be flown again this year. Bear in mind that the Speaker has refused permission to fly the Women's Suffrage flag on 19th Sept each year to commemorate NZ being the first self-governing country in the world where women achieved the right to vote (for the inevitable bitter blokes who hate that women can vote - get a life). Why is the Speaker okay about these done-nothing-special flags flying, whilst refusing one which represents an actual world-first achievement? These TQ+ flags should be nowhere near government buildings. All they represent is an ideology.

The two leaders walk up the steps toward the Great Hall of the People, and midway up the staircase, President Xi took a moment to explain the design of People’s Square to his guest, President Trump.

🚨 After Trump and Xi’s latest meeting, the Islamic Republic suddenly looks like a regime watching its last major lifeline slip away. Right after reports came out that China and the U.S. agreed the Strait of Hormuz needed to stay open, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rushed out and announced the Strait was now “completely open” again. That is not confidence but a regime scrambling in panic as its leverage rapidly collapses. The Islamic Republic spent years acting like China desperately needed Iran. In reality, the relationship was always massively one-sided. U.S.-China trade is still worth over $400 billion annually even after years of tariffs, tensions, and economic rivalry. China-Iran trade is tiny by comparison, even when including shadow oil shipments and sanctions evasion. Iran’s discounted oil is useful to China, but stable economic relations with the U.S. are vastly more important to Beijing. That is the brutal reality Iran’s leadership seems to be crashing into right now. Even the heavily publicized 25-year China-Iran agreement increasingly looks less like a strategic partnership and more like a dependency arrangement where the Islamic Republic became economically beholden to Beijing while receiving far less in return than originally advertised. China gets heavily discounted oil, leverage, and access. Iran gets deeper dependence, sanctions exposure, shrinking alternatives, and an economy increasingly tied to Beijing’s calculations. And when China has to choose between a $400+ billion relationship with the U.S. or a heavily sanctioned Iran selling discounted oil through shadow networks, the answer was always obvious. For decades, the Islamic Republic relied on three big cards: ⚪️ Threatening Hormuz ⚪️ Selling cheap oil to China ⚪️ Using proxy militias and instability as leverage Now all three are weakening at once. The Islamic Republic increasingly looks like a regime that badly overestimated how important it actually was to China.