If the far-Left rioters fully achieved the destruction of "the system," the result would not be liberation or cheaper living, it would be empty shelves, dry fuel stations, and cities running out of food within days. Recent protests over the cost of living, fuel prices, and school conditions (drawing in student groups and some Yellow Vest elements) ...
Greg Craven, writing in The Australian, has offered an unusually candid examination of Australia's immigration debate and the financial dependence of its universities upon international students. His argument is particularly interesting because he acknowledges something that many members of Australia's political, academic and business establishment...
Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 may eventually be recognised as one of the most consequential interventions in the modern struggle over freedom of expression. What appeared initially to be an extraordinarily expensive and commercially risky purchase became an experiment in challenging the political and institutional assumptions g...
One of the defining intellectual struggles of the modern Western world concerns the nature of human nature itself. Since the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, influential currents of the academic Left have sought to minimise, reinterpret or reject biological explanations of human behaviour, particularly when such explanations appear to conflict with...
Britain has produced another episode of political and cultural absurdity that would have delighted the writers of Monty Python. A 76-year-old pensioner from Southampton, Timothy Miller, found himself before Portsmouth Magistrates' Court after attending an anti-immigration demonstration wearing a burka or niqab. According to reports, Miller was arre...
There was a time when Green politics was principally associated with protecting forests, conserving wildlife, preventing pollution and defending the natural environment against destructive development. Whatever one thought of the movement's economic assumptions, its central mission was at least readily intelligible. Today, across much of the Wester...
Back in the 1960s, I had a conversation with an elderly Italian man who told me how he had survived the Second World War. He had not been a soldier, but a farmer in Italy, living through a period when food shortages, economic disruption and the general hardships of war made survival a daily concern. His secret, he explained, was that he had managed...
During a recent visit to my general practitioner, an interesting conversation arose about pharmaceutical companies and their relationships with doctors. My GP casually mentioned that a visiting pharmaceutical representative had provided him with a bottle of wine and lunch. The lunch was apparently quite tasty, although excessively salty, requiring ...
One of the great conceits of modern civilisation is that exceptional intelligence necessarily produces exceptional judgment. We have constructed an elaborate hierarchy of experts, intellectuals, scientists, economists and policy advisers whose authority rests upon the assumption that superior technical knowledge equips them to make superior decisio...
A new documentary from investigative outlet Muckraker traces the migrant route from West Africa through Spain and France to Britain, examining what the outlet describes as a network sustained by taxpayer-funded aid programs, NGOs, and even Western governments. The 47-minute film, "Replacing Europe," draws on months of reporting and undercover foota...
James Howard Kunstler's 16 October 2026 Substack post "Things Have Changed" argues that Europe has become an adversary of the United States, especially of a Trump-led America, because it has "lost its mind" in pursuit of theories that nations don't matter, that high living standards can be sustained without productive industry, and that carbon is d...
Erwin Chargaff's scientific achievements were substantial. Working at Columbia University, he understood the molecular foundations of heredity at a level achieved by relatively few of his contemporaries. Yet rather than celebrating every subsequent development in molecular biology as an inevitable advance, he became deeply concerned about the direc...
One Nation's Victorian pro-family package, announced on 16 October 2026 by deputy state leader Colleen Harkin, is a clear example of the party leaning into a message that continues to poll well. The package removes out-of-pocket costs for pregnant women in the public system, offers a one-off $2,000 contribution for those using private maternity car...
The 2021 CEIBS piece by Michael Kwan, link below, documents a sharp rise in China's registered divorces: from 2.7 million in 2010 to 4.7 million in 2019 (a 75.5% increase). The divorce-to-marriage ratio reached 50.7% that year, with some north-eastern provinces and cities like Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing higher still. This sits below t...
British comedian Jimmy Carr possesses a remarkable talent for verbal improvisation. Watching a succession of his YouTube performances, one is struck by the extraordinary speed with which he responds to audience comments, frequently transforming an apparently innocent remark into an elaborate insult within seconds. Whatever one thinks of his frequen...
The Australian comedy sketch "Please Explain," satirising Anthony Albanese and his government's enthusiasm for internet censorship, makes some legitimate political points. The Albanese government's attempts to regulate online expression, particularly through its social media policies and broader approach to online safety, deserve vigorous scrutiny ...
"Thousands of Italian mafia members are operating in Australia and until recently had gone largely undetected while "pulling the strings" of other criminal gangs, Australian federal police say. In a press conference on Tuesday, AFP assistant commissioner Nigel Ryan detailed the extent of Italian organised crime, including the 'Ndrangheta, in Austra...
In Silicon Valley the phrase "the Event" is not a conference. It is a shorthand for the day the systems that keep modern life running fail hard enough that money, networks, and political order no longer function as they do now. Recent reporting has shown senior executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier AI companies privately gaming out sc...
There was once a time when governments were expected to accept responsibility for their mistakes. If the economy collapsed, ministers had to explain their economic policies. If public services deteriorated, somebody might ask whether the bureaucracy was functioning properly. If politicians lost elections, they were expected to consider the possibil...
For generations, flying cars have belonged to the world of science fiction. From the futuristic vehicles of The Jetsons to the airborne DeLorean of Back to the Future Part II, the idea of an automobile escaping the limitations of the road has been a recurring symbol of technological progress. On October 15, 2026, at a SpaceX testing facility in McG...
