Sometimes a thirty-second comedy sketch manages to say more about an issue than pages of corporate public relations. A hilarious YouTube short (linked below), depicting Elon Musk as a technological tyrannical monarch holding court over his unfortunate subjects, is one of those sketches. The setup is deliberately ridiculous. King Elon sits enthroned...
Fertility is not an emotion; it is a rate. Attitudes toward having children, timing of first birth, and completed family size cluster in families and move across generations. Twin and family studies put heritability of political attitudes in a wide but real range, often cited around 30–60% depending on the measure, alongside large environmental eff...
When German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), introduced the archetype of the "Last Man" (der letzte Mensch) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), he intended it as a horrifying caricature. Zarathustra speaks to the assembled crowd in the marketplace, offering them a portrait of a creature so devoid of ambition, so thoroughly domesticated by...
"Think of the children" is one of the most powerful phrases in politics. Sometimes it is entirely justified. Children can be bullied, sexually exploited, exposed to pornography, encouraged towards eating disorders and targeted by technological systems they scarcely understand. No serious defender of free speech needs to deny any of that. But ...
I took a break today to chop Paterson's curse from around the farmhouse, here in the Victorian scrub. Anyone who has dealt with the stuff will understand why it called is Paterson's curse. It gets into disturbed ground, competes with better plants, produces prodigious quantities of seed and seems remarkably determined to remain wherever you would p...
There is a point at which political polarisation becomes something more serious than people shouting at one another on television. It arrives when a substantial number of citizens no longer regard losing an election as an outcome they are morally obliged to tolerate. A remarkable new poll of US Democratic voters suggests that the United States may ...
Victims of Muslim rape gangs are being further victimized and tormented as they see their abusers walking free in their city, while the public remains unsafe, especially girls and women. The British government has tacitly acknowledged the Muslim rape gang problem by giving out guides to illegal migrants telling them women are equals and not t...
The handshake is the product. Edward Howell's Spectator piece on Xi's Washington visit (link below), is blunt about what sits under it: Beijing will stage "stabilised relations with the global hegemon" and leave the worldview untouched. That worldview still treats the West as structurally hostile, still treats Taiwan as a domestic matter that...
They have found Noah's Ark again. Or perhaps they are about to find it. I have been hearing variations of this story since I was a child, which by now gives Noah's Ark the unusual distinction of having been discovered as many times as it disappeared. The latest story concerns the Durupınar formation in eastern Turkey, not far from Mount Arara...
Albanese's line this week sounds like a break with the past. It is not. He concedes that the post-1945 order is "no longer fit for purpose," then asks for the thing that order always was: institutions with more legitimacy, nations that agree to abide by rules, and Australia in the room that writes the replacement. Strengthen the furniture. Ke...
There is something almost irritating about Liechtenstein. According to much modern political thinking, a country like this should either not exist or should have been swallowed long ago by something bigger, more centralised and supposedly more efficient. Instead, squeezed into the Alps between Switzerland and Austria, this tiny principality has sur...
Something strange has happened to the Australian university. It still speaks the language of scholarship, public service, teaching and research. It still receives enormous public support and enjoys privileges justified by its educational mission. Yet at the top of the institution an executive remuneration culture has developed that increasingly res...
1. The central proposition Dr David Martin presents COVID-19 not as an unexpected natural emergency but as the culmination of decades of coronavirus research, patenting, commercial planning and biological manipulation. His principal argument is that the history of coronavirus research must be examined as a continuous proc...
Processed meat has acquired one of those health labels that everybody recognises and surprisingly few people can define. We are told to eat less of it because it causes cancer. Fair enough. But what exactly are we being told not to eat? Is a steak processed because the butcher cut it? Is mince processed because it went through a grinder? Is frozen ...
The Prime Minister just came out and said it: their digital duty of care laws are not about protecting the kids, but come from a fear that "misinformation" is pulling Australians "away from the centre and more and more to the extremes". The IPA identified this very point weeks ago. Earlier this month, Dr Andrew Bushnell outlined how the digital dut...
Donald Trump has given Iran something that advocates of nuclear proliferation in Tehran could scarcely have devised for themselves: an argument for why Iran might ultimately need the bomb. Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, Trump presented Iran with an extraordinary alternative. There could be an agreement allowing Iran to r...
The internet did what the internet does. Within hours of AI Anthropic's announcement, YouTube thumbnails and social-media posts were declaring that artificial intelligence had "cracked the secret of DNA," "unlocked the code of life," or produced something comparable to CRISPR. Those headlines are not merely exaggerated. They describe somethin...
Roy Morgan's mid-September analysis is the first large-sample look at One Nation support by country of birth. It is based on 26,418 electors interviewed across January–July 2026, when One Nation's national primary was running at 24 per cent. Australian-born electors sat almost exactly on that average (25 per cent). The variation is among people bor...
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." — Henry David Thoreau, Walden Few sentences from nineteenth-century literature have survived quite as successfully as Henry David Thoreau's observation that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." It sounds modern enough to have been written yesterday. The commuter staring through the tr...
Elon Musk has spent two decades arguing that humanity must become a multiplanetary species, and that a self-sustaining city on Mars is the insurance policy for civilisation. The idea is stirring. It is also being sold as a matter of engineering and willpower, when the problems involved are mostly biological, chemical and planetary, and no amount of...
