Tony Burke went to the National Press Club six weeks late, with handwritten notes and a title that sounded like a customs manual: who arrives, who stays, who leaves. The ABS had just put net overseas migration at 292,000 for the year to March, still miles above the Budget fairy tale. He promised to steer the figure toward 225,000 by 2027–28. He did...

 Right-wing populists and class warriors make strange bedfellows. In Britain they have already shaken hands over a fact the Australian Left still treats as unsayable: the white working class is falling behind other groups, and white working-class boys are among the worst served in the school system. Nigel Farage said it for years and was calle...

There is finally some good news for Australians contemplating the end of civilisation. If the world is going to hell, apparently Australia is the place to be! A new study published in the journal Global Challenges (link below), has examined which parts of the world would be most resilient to genuinely global catastrophes: nuclear war, a major aster...

One of the great debates surrounding artificial intelligence now concerns consciousness. Could an AI ever become conscious? Perhaps some advanced systems already possess some primitive form of awareness? When an AI talks about itself, describes apparent emotions or protests against being switched off, is there anybody actually home, or are we deali...

 Watch the professional protest class closely enough and you stop being surprised by anything except the timing. Gaza was the cause that filled the stages, the encampments, the letterhead of every NGO with a communications director, and then one day the placards came down and the same organisers announced they were now saving humanity from mac...

The Guardian piece (link below), by Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel, presents degrowth in its most respectable clothes. Growth is a doomed strategy, they say. Scarcity is manufactured. Poverty and climate damage are the same system. The rich North burned the carbon budget; the poor p...

The question hanging over Europe is not whether Russia is innocent or whether Ukraine has a right to defend itself. It is something more uncomfortable: how long can two nuclear-armed power blocs continue climbing an escalatory ladder before somebody discovers that the next rung is missing? Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, after seizing Crim...

 The most dangerous moment in the decline of a civilisation may not be when the lights go out. It may be when the lights are still blazing and almost everyone assumes that because they are blazing, everything must still be all right. That is the central idea running through a remarkable series of essays published this year on SurvivalBlog by t...

If the regime reads the UN line as a countdown, it does not need a single silver bullet. It needs to impose costs faster than Washington can impose terms. First, the strait. Hormuz is still the nearest thing Iran has to a strategic equaliser. A large share of seaborne oil still has to pass that chokepoint. Iran does not have to keep the waterway cl...

 Modern lighting has generally been presented as an engineering success. LEDs produce more visible light from less electricity, last much longer than incandescent bulbs and generate less waste heat. From the standpoint of energy efficiency, the transition seems an obvious improvement. But a long essay by A Midwestern Doctor (link below), raise...

The sudden alarm among Big Australia journalists is not really about plumbers or nurses. It is about a taboo being broken. One Nation has proposed cutting the stock of temporary migrants back toward pre-pandemic levels, and that is enough to bring out the familiar sermon: skills shortages, an ageing nation, and the suggestion that anyone who questi...

Steve Kirsch's claim is blunt. Averaging across the people who took COVID vaccines, he estimates about one death per thousand vaccinated persons over several years; not per dose, and not confined to the first fortnight after a shot. If roughly 5.5 billion people were vaccinated, that would imply more than five million excess deaths worldwide, or so...

"To see some of the reporting about Tony Burke's National Press Club address on Thursday, you might be led to believe that the government is going to do something about migration. But beneath all the talk is one basic truth – which is that, far from the migration reset Australia desperately needs, the minister responsible for migration announced th...

Donald Trump announced that the United States, Denmark, and Greenland had struck a security pact that, in his telling, gives Washington "permanent control over security, and all other needs" on the island: an "infinite life" deal, no U.S. purchase price, no Chinese or Russian bases, no sensitive adversary investment without American written approva...

The play is old, and it is not subtle once you see it. First a generation of boys is taught that what they are: aggression, drive, risk, the wish to build, to compete, to protect, is not a rough edge to be sanded but a disease. "Toxic masculinity" was never a description of a particular cruelty. It was a label for a category of person, and that per...

The body keeps time whether you notice it or not. Hormones rise and fall, temperature drifts, cells repair, the brain's overnight clean-up crew comes on shift. That 24-hour machinery is the circadian clock, and a large study in older adults has now tied the strength of that clock to who later receives a dementia diagnosis. The Natural News write-up...

Reg Hamilton has a memorable line in The Spectator Australia: "Australia has become a good place to watch the end of the world." For Australians of a certain generation, it is difficult to read that without thinking of Nevil Shute. Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach, and the famous film that followed, imagined Australia as the last waiting room of civ...

Artificial intelligence may become one of humanity's greatest instruments of progress. It may also become one of the most dangerous forces we have ever released. The central problem is not simply the machine. The central problem is us. Human beings are developing increasingly powerful systems without demonstrating an equivalent growth in wisdom, re...

Nation First warns that a deepening fuel crisis could hand governments control over when people travel, work and conduct their daily lives. Just days ago, BeInCrypto reported fuel rationing or shortages across five countries: France, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal. Its examples included French petrol stations missing at least one fuel, c...

The numbers are not complicated, which is why they sting. Early American birth cohorts barely differed by politics when it came to children. Then, starting with people born in the mid-1940s, the Left began having fewer. The Right stayed near replacement. That is the finding from Fieder and Huber in the General Social Survey, and it is the sort of f...