There's a grim symmetry to the whole thing, and it deserves to be stated plainly. For years the climate-control apparatus trained its fire on livestock: methane from cattle, burps and farts measured, taxed, and eventually discussed as something to be engineered out of existence. New Zealand's government literally proposed a "burp tax" on farm...

The Australian headline says it all: Peter Malinauskas, the South Australian Labor Premier, warning Anthony Albanese not to "join Pauline Hanson's migration madness." Read that sentence slowly. A state Labor Premier, from the party that spent two decades treating any discussion of immigration numbers as a thought crime, is now openly admitting that...

The Macrobusiness item (link below) sits on top of a real labour-market pattern. Sham contracting is how a high-migration intake gets turned into a discount workforce without anyone having to say the word "discount." Australia still tells itself a tidy story about migration. We are short of workers. We import them. They fill gaps, pay tax, and join...

 There are stories that sound so extreme that the sensible first response is disbelief. The recent account involving Sydney pastor Andrew Sedra and his family is one of them. According to reports circulating online, activists arrived at his family home, threatened members of the household, demonstrated knowledge of his family and newborn child...

The movie version has a missile hitting a warship, followed by an enormous fireball and perhaps an aircraft carrier folding in half. Real naval warfare usually does not work like that. More importantly, sinking the ship may not even be the main objective. A U.S. warship is effectively a small city that moves. A destroyer carries roughly 300 people,...

Russian writer Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919) knew how to horrify respectable society. His 1902 story The Abyss (Bezdna) produced a literary scandal in Russia sufficiently intense that more than a century later scholars still write about the controversy surrounding it. Readers were appalled, critics attacked Andreyev, and even Leo Tolstoy reportedly r...

The West, and America, keeps trying to solve a moral problem with a medical word. That is the whole fight. Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children in the basement of a Duxbury house in January 2023 while her husband was out on errands. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. She has never denied the acts. What a Massachuse...

"I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman...

There's something quietly strange about the moment we're in. A pop star's fiancé can spend years in stealth keeping leftover surgical skin alive in a lab, feed what that tissue does into an AI model, and then walk out of stealth with a company that promises better anti-aging molecules. People laughed. Then they got angry. Then they started arguing ...

[Note: submission by a young Adelaide machine learning engineer. While this deals with an issue in pure maths, what is important here is AI may have solved a problem that had stumped humans since it was posed by Jean Leray in 1934. The modern mathematical problem of singularities in the Navier-Stokes equations was officially posed as a Millennium P...

We have been sold a lie, an insidious and pervasive one, which suggests that freedom of speech is merely one right among many, a polite accessory to be balanced against other, more "urgent" concerns like emotional safety, social harmony, and the avoidance of offense. This is the foundational error of our time. Freedom of speech is not a luxury, nor...

We Are Sleepwalking into World War III The rhetoric emanating from Western leaders has crossed a threshold from political posturing to an open declaration of war against Russia. We are not on the brink of a conflict; we are being marched into one by leaders who have abandoned diplomacy for a suicidal path of confrontation. The American public, fed ...

 For a moment, it sounded as though Sam Altman had finally said the quiet part out loud. "We opened Pandora's Box together," he supposedly declares. "The future's inevitable. Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse and we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world." If that were really the chief executive of OpenAI sp...

Researchers associated with Anthropic, one of the world's leading artificial-intelligence companies, have gone public with fears that sufficiently advanced AI could present an existential danger to humanity within the next decade. Most strikingly, Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger has estimated that there is at least a 10 per cent chance of AI kil...

There is nothing inherently fraudulent about a home battery. For households with rooftop solar, the ability to store electricity generated during the day and use it at night can make perfectly good economic sense. Batteries may also have a useful role in a more decentralised electricity system. The problem begins when governments decide that a usef...

Socialism is returning as a mood before it returns as a programme. Young voters hear "healthcare," "housing," "the billionaires," and reach for a word their grandparents treated as a warning label. The establishment treats this as a sudden fever. It is closer to an allergic reaction. For forty years the people who ran the West called a rigged, infl...

A recent Spectator Australia article jokingly suggested that Canberra might one day have to be renamed Buenos Aires. The comparison is deliberately provocative, but behind the joke lies a serious economic question. Could Australia, through a combination of persistent government spending, weak productivity growth, excessive dependence on property an...

The West does not throw Christians to lions. It files them, schools them, and occasionally burns the building of worship. Michael Snyder's latest list is the usual American mix: a Maine custody order that lets a father veto church and Bible reading; churches going up in flames with thin national coverage; a coffee shop in Idaho ejecting a pro-life ...

The article by Tim Sargent (see below), argues that the transatlantic slave trade was not a European invention imposed on Africa, but an expansion of practices already widespread there. Tim Sargent uses that history to question Church of England guilt-trips and reparations talk that treat the Atlantic trade as uniquely originating in Europe and ign...

Predictions of financial apocalypse are cheap. At almost any moment during the past half-century, somebody somewhere has been announcing that shares are about to collapse, banks are about to fail, the dollar is about to die, gold is about to explode and civilisation will shortly discover that compound interest was a terrible idea. Most of these pre...