Russian writer Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919) knew how to horrify respectable society. His 1902 story The Abyss (Bezdna) produced a literary scandal in Russia sufficiently intense that more than a century later scholars still write about the controversy surrounding it. Readers were appalled, critics attacked Andreyev, and even Leo Tolstoy reportedly r...

The West, and America, keeps trying to solve a moral problem with a medical word. That is the whole fight. Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children in the basement of a Duxbury house in January 2023 while her husband was out on errands. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. She has never denied the acts. What a Massachuse...

"I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman...

There's something quietly strange about the moment we're in. A pop star's fiancé can spend years in stealth keeping leftover surgical skin alive in a lab, feed what that tissue does into an AI model, and then walk out of stealth with a company that promises better anti-aging molecules. People laughed. Then they got angry. Then they started arguing ...

[Note: submission by a young Adelaide machine learning engineer. While this deals with an issue in pure maths, what is important here is AI may have solved a problem that had stumped humans since it was posed by Jean Leray in 1934. The modern mathematical problem of singularities in the Navier-Stokes equations was officially posed as a Millennium P...

We have been sold a lie, an insidious and pervasive one, which suggests that freedom of speech is merely one right among many, a polite accessory to be balanced against other, more "urgent" concerns like emotional safety, social harmony, and the avoidance of offense. This is the foundational error of our time. Freedom of speech is not a luxury, nor...

We Are Sleepwalking into World War III The rhetoric emanating from Western leaders has crossed a threshold from political posturing to an open declaration of war against Russia. We are not on the brink of a conflict; we are being marched into one by leaders who have abandoned diplomacy for a suicidal path of confrontation. The American public, fed ...

 For a moment, it sounded as though Sam Altman had finally said the quiet part out loud. "We opened Pandora's Box together," he supposedly declares. "The future's inevitable. Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse and we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world." If that were really the chief executive of OpenAI sp...

Researchers associated with Anthropic, one of the world's leading artificial-intelligence companies, have gone public with fears that sufficiently advanced AI could present an existential danger to humanity within the next decade. Most strikingly, Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger has estimated that there is at least a 10 per cent chance of AI kil...

There is nothing inherently fraudulent about a home battery. For households with rooftop solar, the ability to store electricity generated during the day and use it at night can make perfectly good economic sense. Batteries may also have a useful role in a more decentralised electricity system. The problem begins when governments decide that a usef...

Socialism is returning as a mood before it returns as a programme. Young voters hear "healthcare," "housing," "the billionaires," and reach for a word their grandparents treated as a warning label. The establishment treats this as a sudden fever. It is closer to an allergic reaction. For forty years the people who ran the West called a rigged, infl...

A recent Spectator Australia article jokingly suggested that Canberra might one day have to be renamed Buenos Aires. The comparison is deliberately provocative, but behind the joke lies a serious economic question. Could Australia, through a combination of persistent government spending, weak productivity growth, excessive dependence on property an...

The West does not throw Christians to lions. It files them, schools them, and occasionally burns the building of worship. Michael Snyder's latest list is the usual American mix: a Maine custody order that lets a father veto church and Bible reading; churches going up in flames with thin national coverage; a coffee shop in Idaho ejecting a pro-life ...

The article by Tim Sargent (see below), argues that the transatlantic slave trade was not a European invention imposed on Africa, but an expansion of practices already widespread there. Tim Sargent uses that history to question Church of England guilt-trips and reparations talk that treat the Atlantic trade as uniquely originating in Europe and ign...

Predictions of financial apocalypse are cheap. At almost any moment during the past half-century, somebody somewhere has been announcing that shares are about to collapse, banks are about to fail, the dollar is about to die, gold is about to explode and civilisation will shortly discover that compound interest was a terrible idea. Most of these pre...

Childcare policy in the rich world has a quiet prejudice. It will spend public money to put a toddler in an institution so that both adults can clock in. It will not spend the same money, or anything like it, if one parent stays home and does the work herself. The arrangement is sold as help for families. It is help for a particular family shape: t...

A country does not slide into civil disturbance because a politician invents a mood. It slides because the public has been telling the same story for years and the state has answered with process. Nigel Farage's warning after Portsmouth, that Britain is on the edge of "serious civil disturbance" if the boats are not stopped, is not a novelty act. I...

"What we call "globalism" has been on the march for eighty years. A system that embraces centralized markets, bureaucratic regulation, international institutions, and so-called non-governmental organizations (predominantly funded by governments), globalism places significant power in the hands of a small collection of wealthy and powerful stakehold...

A civilisation that wants women to be adults cannot keep treating them as weather. Weather happens to you. An adult acts, and then answers for the act. The Lindsay Clancy case has become a public argument because a large part of the culture no longer accepts that sequence when the actor is female and the wreckage is intimate. Three children are dea...

A map is a lie that tells the truth. That is not a slogan. It is the first fact of cartography. The Earth is a sphere, slightly flattened, spinning, and continuously changing at the edges of ice and coast. Paper is flat. A screen is flat. Any attempt to put one onto the other must choose what to preserve and what to sacrifice. Distances, areas, ang...