"If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed." It sounds almost comically modest advice fromUS Admiral William H. McRaven, a man whose military career involved some of the most consequential special operations undertaken by the United States. Yet that was precisely the point. Before attempting the extraordinary, learn to complete ...

 Australia has spent decades conducting an extraordinary social experiment with tobacco. Cigarettes remain legal, but governments have progressively taxed, regulated and socially marginalised smoking to the point where the legal product has become extraordinarily expensive. The justification has always been public health. Make smoking sufficie...

 So, there they were, the good people of the Purple Mountain Observatory, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is itself nested under the State Council, which is of course nested under the Communist Party, quietly trying to plant a bit of Ground Based Space Infrastructure in the gentle hills of New Zealand. Nothing sinister, you unde...

 No one needs to claim that Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham personally participated in the crimes of Britain's grooming gangs to ask difficult questions about political responsibility. The more serious and defensible issue is institutional failure. Both men occupied senior positions within institutions that intersected with one of the most disgra...

 Academic freedom is easiest to defend when nobody cares about the answer. The real test comes when researchers investigate questions that governments, universities, medical institutions or scientific establishments would rather regard as settled. COVID-19 provided perhaps the greatest such test of recent times, and the controversy surrounding...

The question should not be: "why does China use force against illegal border crossings"? China is doing what every functioning state in history has done: treating its border as a border. The question is why the West has decided that not doing that is somehow a virtue. And the answer is that the West has been captured by an ideology that has redefin...

In a matter of days, once-pristine beaches in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta have been reduced to open-air dumps and disease-ridden camps occupied by thousands of illegal migrants who refused to leave after the mass invasion from Morocco. Locals describe feces, urine, garbage, and makeshift shacks covering the sand. Contagious illnesses are spreading...

For three decades, the climate establishment has treated clouds as an annoying footnote, a "source of uncertainty" to be scrubbed away, a rounding error in models built around carbon dioxide. But a growing body of work says the opposite. Clouds are not the noise in the climate system. They are the engine, and CO2 is the passenger. The implications ...

Australia likes to think of itself as the lucky country, and nowhere does that description appear more justified than beneath our feet. We possess extraordinary deposits of iron ore, coal, gas, gold, lithium and other minerals. We sit close to the rapidly developing economies of Asia. We have political stability, sophisticated financial markets and...

Norman Fenton's The Capture of Academia is a forensic account of how British universities abandoned open inquiry for ideological conformity. Drawing on nearly five decades inside the system, the Bayesian statistician documents the slow, almost organic replacement of scholarship with activism. Hiring networks, reputational pressure, EDI bureaucracy ...

Cambridge University is now, essentially, a laughing-stock. Its DEI poster-boy, Jason Arday, whom they appointed Professor of the Sociology of Education in 2023 (aged just 37), has been revealed, rather predictably, to have plagiarized much of his doctoral thesis, to have produced woeful publications, and to be a complete fantasist. In spite of thi...

The Christian Church in the West was once a bulwark of civilisation, preaching the dignity of every human soul, the value of ordered liberty, charity, and personal responsibility. Today, large parts of it have abandoned that mission and transformed into something unrecognisable: the Church of Anti-Racism. This new faith replaces the Cross with crit...

For centuries, Britain was the great exporter of freedom. From the Magna Carta to parliamentary democracy, common law, and the principles that inspired the American Founding, the British people gave the world a model of ordered liberty, free speech, and limited government. That legacy now lies in ruins. Today, under Keir Starmer's Labour government...

The West is not dying from external conquest. It is aborting itself out of existence. Britain stands as a grim warning. In 2026, the country will cross three dark milestones: deaths will exceed births for the first time in modern history; British women will abort roughly one in three pregnancies; and the number of foreigners living in the UK will e...

Any hope of a quick return to stable, abundant oil and gas flows is already fading. The structural problems plaguing global energy markets run far deeper than this latest diplomatic pause. Even if open conflict is avoided for now, Western nations, including Australia, face persistent fuel difficulties driven by years of policy failure, underinvestm...

Northwestern Europeans are psychologically strange by the standards of our species. This is not an insult. It is one of the most important facts in human history. For most of humanity, across most of time and most places, people have understood themselves primarily through relationships: son of X, member of clan Y, from village Z. They have reasone...

President Trump had been preparing to claim a form of victory in the ongoing conflict with Iran by securing the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Reports indicate he was even open to walking away without a comprehensive nuclear deal. Iran's recent hard-line demands, billions in reparations and a total U.S. troop withdrawal, have disrupted tho...

Welcome to the crepitant groans of the collapse. You think some people suffer during this time and most would agree they do. However, imagine this situation: you are one of the most gifted composers in history but God or nature has allowed you to become stone deaf. What a tragedy? Maybe a comedy? Depending on how you view hardship, a special few ig...

Labor's immigration story changes with the audience and the polling, but the method stays the same. Claim control. Claim reduction. Claim purpose. Then watch the numbers and the outcomes refuse to match the words. Ministers announce that net overseas migration has fallen dramatically from its peak. Technically true if you measure from the post-pand...

Walk around an Australian university campus long enough and sooner or later you will encounter one of the most durable political arguments ever devised. Mention the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, East Germany or another disastrous communist experiment and somebody will produce the magic words: "But that wasn't real commu...