G M retweeted
Usman Khawaja's 12 Major Statements on the 2018 Sandpapergate Scandal:
1. The Entire Australian Team Was Involved
"It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us."
2. The Truth Should Have Come Out
"In an ideal world, I don't want to do this. I don't want to be the one who comes out and talks about the truth. The issue is that I genuinely thought after eight years the truth would have been out by now."
3. The Team Should Have Taken Collective Responsibility
"We did this as a team. We knew what was going on, and we have to take it as a team, and so I was always of that stance."
4. Three Players Were Left to Face the Consequences
"Obviously, it didn't work that way, and those three guys got crucified."
5. On David Warner's Treatment
"I've seen Davey over the last eight years just get nailed bad over and over again, and it's taken a big man not to say anything and just to stay quiet."
6. On Cameron Bancroft's Career
"He's been a terrific cricketer for a long time, but I know it's something that hangs over his head."
7. On Steven Smith
"Steve's lucky, the greatest batsman of my generation. He came back from that, and he's come back as good as he ever was in that first Ashes series, and it's kind of been forgotten for him in some respects."
8. The Three Players Deserve Justice
"These guys, in some respect, deserve that justice. And it just doesn't feel like anyone's going to give it to them."
9. Cricket Australia Never Interviewed Him
"I was sitting next to Cam Bancroft that whole Test match, and I didn't get interviewed."
10. He Waited for Cricket Australia to Contact Him
"And I was waiting for my phone to ring. It just never rang, and then the penalties were given, and I couldn't believe it."
11. On South Africa's Ball-Tampering Methods
"They were so good, and I discuss in a little bit of detail about what I'd heard from one of their players and what they were doing."
12. Australia Was Trying to Keep Up With South Africa
"They were far better at working on the ball than Australia. We were trying to keep up with them."
#UsmanKhawaja
G M retweeted
Josh Inglis became the ONLY Aussie in history to have multiple tons in each international format... that is some stat!
#UnplayablePodcast | @Qantas | #SAvAUS
G M retweeted
I caught up on Friday with my friend and business partner Anatole @kaletsky for our weekly Gavekal zoominar. We were supposed to discuss how sustainable the AI capex spending boom would prove to be in the face of rapidly rising corporate bond yields? But given the headlines on France, on the Middle-East and on the growing likelihood of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, we struggled to stay on track…
I asked the @gavekal editors to remove the locks on the podcast…
research.gavekal.com/content…
G M retweeted
“An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue.”
- Russian Proverb
The Russian proverb, “An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue,” reveals a powerful truth about genuine friendship and loyalty. Those who secretly dislike you or simply don’t care may agree with everything you say, offering false reassurance rather than risking confrontation. After all, your mistakes mean little to someone who has no real concern for your well-being.
A true friend, however, isn’t afraid to disagree, question your decisions, or tell you something you may not want to hear. Even when honesty creates tension, their willingness to challenge you comes from a place of genuine care. Ultimately, the proverb reminds us that real loyalty isn’t about constant agreement. It’s about having someone who values your growth and well-being more than keeping you comfortable.
G M retweeted
Tourists ride the Tokyo subway and whisper: "Look how peaceful! Japanese people are so zen!"
That train is not zen. That train is a pressurized submarine where eighty people are praying nobody coughs.
The silence is not peace. The silence is terror.
If your ringtone goes off, nobody yells. That would require spending words on you. Instead, eighty pairs of eyes flick up for 0.4 seconds and assign you a permanent social penalty score.
You think we stay quiet because we are calm.
We stay quiet because if you make a sound in that metal tube, you disrupt the invisible force field keeping millions of exhausted strangers from killing each other.
The Tokyo train is not quiet because we love peace.
It is quiet because one loud phone call is an act of war.
G M retweeted
The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan.
In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have.
So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently.
An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident.
The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010.
The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.
G M retweeted
Bondi Beach Hero, Ahmed al Ahmed does hisfirst interview. Listen to what he told the shooter
This man is a HERO and the media is trying to hide him because he is Muslim.
The world MUST remember this man, what he did, and use this to UNITE.
G M retweeted
Re: Nick Fuentes article…
Thank you for all the feedback. It is my most read and commented on article.
I just wrote some thoughts and didn’t expect so many to engage with it. I’m going to write a follow up today.
If you want to read the article:
open.substack.com/pub/peterm…
G M retweeted
'He has a point, but he's too blunt.'
From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it's proved shockingly successful. Trans activists' shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they've been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step.
Time and again, I've seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. 'Well, yes, maybe there's something in what you're saying, but it's hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can't you be nice? Why won't you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don't you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?'
As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, 'it's not that I couldn't see your point, but did you have to say it that way?' We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it 'gender affirming care.' We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn't exist.
Either a man can be a woman, or he can't. Either women deserve rights, or they don't. Either there's a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn't. Either you're on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you're not. The alternative to being 'blunt' - using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on - was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We've always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.
G M retweeted
So many answers to my post are of the type "we're owning China by banning foreign students to Harvard", "we get nothing for educating foreigners", "with this we'll teach Americans and not our competitors", etc.
It's astonishing to see how ignorant Americans can be with regards to the source of their power. And also, judging by the intellectual caliber of these responses, it demonstrates in itself that if you limit U.S. universities to American students only, the standards will crater.
I hate to break it to you but this move will not even remotely "own China". Quite the contrary this is one of the biggest self-own in American history.
The whole challenge of competing with the U.S. is that you're not only competing with Americans but with the collective brainpower of 140+ countries concentrated in American institutions. Including, as is often the case, competing with your own country's brightest minds who joined the "opposite camp" as it were.
Furthermore, even if they go back home after their studies, these students often become part of their countries' elites and maintain lifelong networks, friendships, and cultural affinities with America, ensuring that when they're making decisions as CEOs, ministers, or judges, they have an instinctive understanding of and sympathy for the U.S.'s perspective.
Want to throw all that away? Be my guest. But I'll end this post with the concluding sentence of historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume "A Study of History" where he writes: "Civilizations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives."
G M retweeted
As a professional comedian with lived experience, I can tell you that this is hilarious but you are not in a position to comment.
