Andrew Devine's recent Daily Sceptic piece argues that Left-leaning Boomers (born 1946–64) and Gen Xers (1965–80) in Britain were conditioned by the race politics of the 1960s–90s to treat any criticism of immigration as equivalent to racial hatred. In those decades, opposition to the far smaller inflows of the time often came from overtly racist q...

With the 2026 midterms less than two weeks away, Victor Davis Hanson has framed the contest as something deeper than ordinary partisan score-settling. In an American Greatness essay, he describes a "conflict of visions": socialism versus capitalism, limited versus expansive government, and preservation of longstanding institutions versus their deli...

In mid-to-late October 2026, France saw some of its worst civil unrest in years. What began as student protests over school conditions and the cost of living expanded into nationwide marches involving hundreds of thousands of people. Parallel to the largely peaceful demonstrations, black-bloc-style groups, opportunistic looters, and others engaged ...

On 21–22 October 2026, a cluster of Australian government websites flickered offline or displayed maintenance pages. The Australian Signals Directorate's own cyber.gov.au portal went dark. The Australian Bureau of Statistics site was unavailable. Jobs and Skills Australia and others followed. A spokesperson for the Minister for Cybersecurity confir...

The dream of extending human life has occupied scientists, philosophers and ordinary people for centuries. Modern medicine has already made enormous progress in preventing premature death, but the more ambitious goal of reversing biological ageing remains largely beyond our reach. A new study published in Aging Cell in October 2026 provides another...

For millions of people who struggle to obtain a decent night's sleep, the search for a safe, inexpensive and effective remedy is an ongoing frustration. Prescription sleeping tablets can produce unwanted side effects, while many over-the-counter products offer little more than expensive promises. In Australia, access to melatonin is regulated, maki...

A familiar Musk pattern: two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have formed special committees of independent directors to study a merger. A combined entity would be worth something on the order of $3.5 trillion, the largest corporate combination in history, tying rockets, satellites, electric vehicles, batteries, robots, and AI computers under on...

Political violence must be condemned. It must also be understood. Asking why people threaten politicians does not excuse the threats, any more than investigating the causes of crime excuses criminals. The latest reported total number of threats against public office holders rose from 951 to 1,067, an increase of 116, or 12.2 percent. These figures ...

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 ...