Modern civilisation rests upon a comforting assumption: technological progress is cumulative and essentially irreversible. Once a society has discovered how to build complex machines, construct sophisticated infrastructure or harness particular forms of energy, that knowledge becomes part of humanity's permanent intellectual inheritance. Future gen...

In a televised address after the 17 October unrest, Emmanuel Macron asked how French people could do such things to France. He distinguished between demonstrators raising legitimate grievances over the cost of living, fuel prices and the condition of public education, and those he described as ultra-left agitators joined by criminals who looted sho...

The world may be approaching a period of extraordinary economic and geopolitical instability, not because of one isolated catastrophe, but because several major crises threaten to converge. Michael Snyder, writing in his 19 October 2026 article, We Are Facing a Global Energy Crisis, a Global Food Crisis, a European Financial Crisis, the End of the ...

Margaret Thatcher's observation that socialist governments "always run out of other people's money" was made in a 1976 television interview while she was Leader of the Opposition. The remark captured a recurring fiscal pattern: redistribution and nationalisation eventually exhaust the taxable surplus generated by productive activity. The point is s...

For several decades, Australian universities have increasingly embraced a neoliberal model of higher education in which students are treated as customers, degrees as commercial products, research as a competitive industry and institutional expansion as an overriding measure of success. The traditional conception of the university as a community of ...

An extraordinary allegation is circulating in American conservative media as the November 2026 midterm elections approach. According to a series of investigations published on X by the researcher known as DataRepublican, whose name is Jennica Pounds, a network involving former USAID personnel, Left-wing activists and organisations associated with a...

The air rifle was shared. The other kid took it when no one was looking, the stock snapped, and he quietly put it back in the corner so that the next person to pick it up would be the one seen with the broken piece in his hands. That is the posture Tony Burke adopted last week when he was asked whether the Albanese government had made a mistake by ...

By late 2026 the contrast between Rome and Paris is no longer subtle. Giorgia Meloni, who took office in October 2022 as Italy's first female prime minister, has just completed nearly four years in power, the longest continuous government in the postwar Italian Republic. Emmanuel Macron, elected in 2017 on a promise to transform France, is finishin...

One of the most extraordinary books in twentieth-century psychology was Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976. Jaynes proposed that human consciousness, at least in the form of introspective, narratively organised self-awareness familiar to modern people, was a relatively recent cultur...

Modern medicine has achieved extraordinary successes in treating infections, managing chronic illness, repairing injuries and extending human life. Yet there is another side to medical practice that receives considerably less public attention: the illness, injury and sometimes death caused by medical treatment itself. The technical term is iatrogen...

He said it one evening, half in jest, while the others were talking about lotteries and sudden fortunes. "Give me all the money in the world," he said, "and I will not become worse. I will only become more useful." Something in the room, or outside it, heard him, and decided to test him. Within three years he was the richest man who had ever lived....

Leo Tolstoy is not usually filed under "comic writers." War and Peace and Anna Karenina are monuments of psychological and historical seriousness; the late moral tracts and the flight to Astapovo feel closer to prophecy than to wit. Yet a distinct and powerful strain of humour runs through his work, especially the later work, and it is inseparable ...

To truly capture the staggering hypocrisy of modern campus life, one must examine the bizarre theater where professorial anti-capitalist posturing dances hand-in-hand with corporate venture capitalism. For decades, the intellectual machinery of the university has pumped out a steady drumbeat of radical rhetoric—teaching generations of undergraduate...

Discussions of racism in contemporary Western societies tend to follow familiar patterns. There are established assumptions about who exercises power, who suffers discrimination, and which social groups are most likely to be responsible for racial hostility. Yet human relationships are considerably more complicated than the ideological categories c...

Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin has offered a striking interpretation of the political turmoil spreading across Europe. In an interview published by Multipolar Press on 20 October 2026, entitled Europe and the Armies of Chaos, Dugin argues that the demonstrations, riots and social tensions afflicting European countries are not merely responses ...

 There is an old story about a farmer who had a serious rat problem. Instead of setting conventional traps or putting out poison, he devised a particularly cunning scheme. He threw a dead pig into a deep, dry well and waited. The smell of rotting meat attracted rats from the surrounding countryside. One by one, the rats jumped into the well to...

You've probably seen the global headlines: "Rainwater is no longer safe to drink anywhere on Earth." Those stories, driven largely by a 2022 Stockholm University/ETH Zurich analysis, compared worldwide rainwater PFAS levels against extremely low U.S. EPA health advisories and concluded the thresholds were exceeded even in Antarctica and on the Tibe...

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to produce disturbing revelations, years after the convicted sex offender's death in a New York jail in 2019. One of the strangest mysteries concerns his apparent fascination with dentistry, the presence of dental equipment at his properties, his efforts to secure dental qualifications for his girlfriend, and t...

 Professor David Betz has warned that Britain is drifting towards civil war. No, says P.K. O'Sullivan: the war has already started, one broken friendship, family row and motorway blockade at a time. Professor David Betz of King's College London has done something few academics ever manage: he has got a good part of the country talking seriousl...

There is a remarkable philosophical irony in the controversy surrounding American philosopher David Skrbina, one of the contemporary world's more uncompromising critics of technological civilisation. Skrbina has spent much of his intellectual career arguing that modern technology is not simply a neutral collection of instruments under human control...