During a recent visit to my general practitioner, an interesting conversation arose about pharmaceutical companies and their relationships with doctors. My GP casually mentioned that a visiting pharmaceutical representative had provided him with a bottle of wine and lunch. The lunch was apparently quite tasty, although excessively salty, requiring ...
One of the great conceits of modern civilisation is that exceptional intelligence necessarily produces exceptional judgment. We have constructed an elaborate hierarchy of experts, intellectuals, scientists, economists and policy advisers whose authority rests upon the assumption that superior technical knowledge equips them to make superior decisio...
A new documentary from investigative outlet Muckraker traces the migrant route from West Africa through Spain and France to Britain, examining what the outlet describes as a network sustained by taxpayer-funded aid programs, NGOs, and even Western governments. The 47-minute film, "Replacing Europe," draws on months of reporting and undercover foota...
James Howard Kunstler's 16 October 2026 Substack post "Things Have Changed" argues that Europe has become an adversary of the United States, especially of a Trump-led America, because it has "lost its mind" in pursuit of theories that nations don't matter, that high living standards can be sustained without productive industry, and that carbon is d...
Erwin Chargaff's scientific achievements were substantial. Working at Columbia University, he understood the molecular foundations of heredity at a level achieved by relatively few of his contemporaries. Yet rather than celebrating every subsequent development in molecular biology as an inevitable advance, he became deeply concerned about the direc...
One Nation's Victorian pro-family package, announced on 16 October 2026 by deputy state leader Colleen Harkin, is a clear example of the party leaning into a message that continues to poll well. The package removes out-of-pocket costs for pregnant women in the public system, offers a one-off $2,000 contribution for those using private maternity car...
The 2021 CEIBS piece by Michael Kwan, link below, documents a sharp rise in China's registered divorces: from 2.7 million in 2010 to 4.7 million in 2019 (a 75.5% increase). The divorce-to-marriage ratio reached 50.7% that year, with some north-eastern provinces and cities like Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing higher still. This sits below t...
British comedian Jimmy Carr possesses a remarkable talent for verbal improvisation. Watching a succession of his YouTube performances, one is struck by the extraordinary speed with which he responds to audience comments, frequently transforming an apparently innocent remark into an elaborate insult within seconds. Whatever one thinks of his frequen...
The Australian comedy sketch "Please Explain," satirising Anthony Albanese and his government's enthusiasm for internet censorship, makes some legitimate political points. The Albanese government's attempts to regulate online expression, particularly through its social media policies and broader approach to online safety, deserve vigorous scrutiny ...
"Thousands of Italian mafia members are operating in Australia and until recently had gone largely undetected while "pulling the strings" of other criminal gangs, Australian federal police say. In a press conference on Tuesday, AFP assistant commissioner Nigel Ryan detailed the extent of Italian organised crime, including the 'Ndrangheta, in Austra...
In Silicon Valley the phrase "the Event" is not a conference. It is a shorthand for the day the systems that keep modern life running fail hard enough that money, networks, and political order no longer function as they do now. Recent reporting has shown senior executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier AI companies privately gaming out sc...
There was once a time when governments were expected to accept responsibility for their mistakes. If the economy collapsed, ministers had to explain their economic policies. If public services deteriorated, somebody might ask whether the bureaucracy was functioning properly. If politicians lost elections, they were expected to consider the possibil...
For generations, flying cars have belonged to the world of science fiction. From the futuristic vehicles of The Jetsons to the airborne DeLorean of Back to the Future Part II, the idea of an automobile escaping the limitations of the road has been a recurring symbol of technological progress. On October 15, 2026, at a SpaceX testing facility in McG...
Two church non-profits have taken in at least $62 million to build the Somali community in Minnesota — leading to the rise of Ilhan Omar and the fraud scandals that have gripped that state, The Post can reveal. Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services were at the forefront of reshaping the frigid Land of 10,000 Lakes thanks to generous gover...
The famous song from the 1960s musical Hair, "Let the Sunshine In," may contain more wisdom about human health than its creators ever imagined. Modern civilisation has increasingly separated people from the natural cycles of daylight and darkness that governed human biology for countless generations. Millions now spend their working days beneath ar...
[Contribution from a young software engineer, Adelaide] Most internet users have learned to regard suspicious advertisements as potential security threats. The conventional advice is familiar: do not click on dubious links, avoid unexpected downloads, and never enter personal information into unfamiliar websites. Unfortunately, a disturbing new inv...
Australia's multicultural "success" story in displacing and replacing Anglo-Australia, is frequently told through the language of food. There are Lebanese restaurants serving magnificent grilled meats, Turkish bakeries producing excellent bread, Iraqi establishments offering traditional dishes, and countless cafés where Australians can experience t...
David Flint's 17 October 2026 Spectator Australia column, "Trillion-dollar suicide note: Pauline's royal commission to expose climate corruption," endorses One Nation leader Pauline Hanson's call for a royal commission into what she terms climate corruption. Flint treats Australia's net-zero and Paris Agreement commitments as an expensive, evidence...
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most consequential technologies in human history, yet the decisions governing its development are concentrated in the hands of a remarkably small number of corporations and technology executives. In a recent article in The Spectator, Louis Sarkozy raises a disturbing question: why should humani...
Jay Beecher's 16 October 2026 Spectator essay, "Believe women? No – believe evidence," uses a pending civil lawsuit at Cornell University to reject the "believe women" slogan in favour of testing every accusation against the available evidence. The piece treats the slogan as a well-intentioned but ultimately corrosive shift from "take reports serio...
