Leith van Onselen's verdict (link below), on One Nation's latest immigration plan is refreshingly untheatrical: the core is decent, although the detail needs work. That is a better starting point than either "bombshell" or "racist." The argument worth considering is that Australia's enormous stock of temporary visa holders has become a housing, inf...

"He was going to die anyway" is the sentence that should stop us in our tracks, because it does not describe a special class of patient. It describes the human race. Applied to a desperately ill child, it can sound like mercy. Applied to your mother, the stranger on the bus or yourself, it becomes something else entirely. Once eventual death become...

Bjorn Lomborg's latest pass through the energy numbers is the sort of sentence that should end a thousand sermons and almost never does. In 2024 the world still drew about four-fifths of its primary energy from coal, oil and gas. On his accounting the share was 80.8 per cent, barely moved from 81.4 per cent in 2000. Absolute use is not fading. It i...

 "Where hustle's the name of the game And nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain; There's been a load of compromisin' On the road to my horizon But I'm gonna be where the lights are shinin' on me …" Glen Campbell Rhinestone Cowboy (1975) If you wanted to design the least threatening figure in popular culture, you might come up wi...

A certain class of people needs an ending of the world the way a liturgy needs a last judgment. The subject changes; the posture does not. Carbon had a long run. When the public began to notice the subsidies, the aviation, and the coastal houses that somehow never moved inland, the apparatus did not dissolve. It changed costume. The new sacred emer...

The British state is not simply failing British women. In cases like that of Radiet Meles, an illegal who carried out two vicious sexual assaults, it is producing the conditions in which they are harmed and then treating the resulting outrage as the scandal. A genuine failure is a bridge that collapses under a load nobody foresaw. What Britain has ...

Big AI firms want a cartel. Does Artificial Intelligence pose a threat to humanity? Absolutely! But only assuming humanity is defined as "the billionaire owners of A.I. companies intent on crushing their competition." [Ed: I don't think that's the definition.] You don't need to be a super smart A.I. machine to know that large corporations love gove...

Socrates distrusted one of the greatest technologies human beings ever invented: writing. He wrote nothing himself. What we know of him comes principally through others, especially Plato. In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell the story of the Egyptian god Theuth, who proudly presents writing to King Thamus as an invention that will improve wisdom an...

If Ursula von der Leyen can invite Canada to become the European Union's first "associate member," then the only honest follow-up is: why stop at Ottawa? By the test she actually used: shared values, supply chains, Ukraine, critical minerals, a dislike of the present American president, Australia is sitting there with a better résumé and a worse co...

The Lindsay Clancy trial ended without a verdict, but what happened afterwards may tell us almost as much about contemporary America as the trial itself. Clancy admitted killing her three young children in January 2023. The issue before the Massachusetts jury was whether mental disease or defect left her legally lacking criminal responsibility. Aft...

 Sir Walter Logie Forbes Murdoch was born on 17 September 1874 at Rosehearty, a fishing village near Aberdeen in Scotland, the fourteenth and youngest child of the Reverend James Murdoch, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He came to Melbourne with his family at the age of ten, attended Camberwell Grammar and Scotch College, and gradua...

The real question isn't whether the replacement is happening: it is, and the data shows it plainly. The question is whether it produces a functioning society or a low-grade permanent crisis that suits the people in charge just fine. The Sunday Times' figure is blunt enough that it should have forced a national argument and instead produced a shrug....

The headline alone is a chef's kiss of political awkwardness: the Prime Minister's own handpicked expert, the person chosen to lend credibility to the government's migration stance, ends up publicly endorsing chunks of Pauline Hanson's platform. That's the thing about expert panels: they're supposed to launder policy, not confess that the populist ...

Sean Thomas's piece in The Spectator (link below), captures the dizzying media circus following Dario Amodei's call to "pace the frontier" and slow down AI development. The scene carries a distinct absurdity: Silicon Valley CEOs lining up on Sunday talk shows to solemnly warn us about the apocalyptic power of the very engines they are building. The...

Pauline Hanson has spent three decades saying things that other Australian politicians would rather not discuss. Sometimes that willingness has allowed her to put neglected questions onto the political agenda. Sometimes it has allowed a bad argument to obscure a potentially serious one. Her recently resurfaced comments about Indigenous Australians ...

For years, the Strait of Hormuz has been treated as the great choke point of the global energy system. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes through that narrow strip of water between Iran and Oman. Every war game involving the Persian Gulf eventually arrives at the same question: what happens if Hormuz closes...

The "racism" card is a perfect example of a rhetorical weapon that worked too well, so well that it eventually consumed itself. For about five decades it functioned as a genuine debate-ender. Call a position "racist" and you didn't have to engage the argument; the accusation itself was the argument. It banked on a very specific resource: white guil...

Dreyman, link below to his article on the sterilisation of healthy young men, is correct about the atmosphere surrounding these articles, and the atmosphere is the real subject. A serious country does not treat the sterilisation of healthy young men as a light human-interest story. When national newspapers present vasectomy as maturity, generosity,...

Unlike most Western countries, Denmark tracks crimes committed by immigrants and tracks them by country of origin, and the news is just as bad as you expect. Migrants from MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey) are more than two times more likely to commit crimes, and their descendants are worse by a significant margin. Berlinske:...

Cardinal Gerhard Müller has warned that while the Christian West is facing an "internal apostasy", Islam is growing as Muslims "do not respect a weak Christianity". The West, he warned, is dealing with "an unprecedented identity crisis." Formerly Christian nations are under assault from within and without, the cardinal stated, as the foundations of...