The London Times handed its critics a gift they did not need. An anonymous Home Office decision-maker told the paper that, at best, one per cent of asylum claims are genuine. The headline put the figure on the front page. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The American Conservative, calls that an unforced error: a number with no method attached, precise ...
Australia went first. From December 2025 the under-16 social-media ban has been live: platforms in the eSafety net: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X and the rest of that list, are supposed to keep children off, and the regulator has already talked in millions of accounts removed. Britain has now said it will copy the model and, in ...
Donald Trump's latest blast at the Supreme Court is the sound of a man discovering that appointees are not employees. After the Court left in place a block on his mail-in ballot plan, he took to Truth Social to call the ruling a bad decision, to praise Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito as legends for dissenting, and to say that certain other justice...
The Australian Government has launched its latest attack on men: axing specialist prostate cancer nurses. We all know they would never do the same to breast cancer, says Bettina Arndt. Australians are used to their Government's war on men — treating males like a species to be managed, and boys like suspects in training. But last month, out of the b...
There are songs one hears once and never forgets, and there are songs one hears for half a lifetime without ever really hearing them. Wayne Fontana's 1966 hit Pamela, Pamela fell into the second category for me. I have known the song for decades. It was pleasant, catchy, nostalgic, unmistakably of its period, and I never thought very much more abou...
There are lies told for money, lies told for power and lies told simply to escape punishment. Perhaps the most dangerous lie of all is the one told because, at the time, everybody convinces themselves that telling the truth would cause too much trouble. That is the moral heart of Francis U. Ejebi's story I Was the Family's Black Sheep Until the Law...
The Medium piece (link below), is reacting to a real result: in a preregistered three-party Turing test, GPT-4.5 with a human-like persona prompt was judged to be the human 73% of the time, more often than the actual human interlocutor. That is the first clean empirical pass of the standard (short, text-only, three-party) version of Turing's imitat...
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...
