Sean Connery (1930-2020) did not merely play James Bond. He installed him. Everything after is a cover version with better gadgets and a worse conscience. And as with Daniel Craig, less manhood and more woke. That is not nostalgia talking. It is craft. Connery had the face of a Glasgow dock and the tailoring of a man who expected the room to adjust...
May it please the court. The Australian's Inquirer piece (exhibit A, linked below) asks whether Tony Burke's "immigration fix" is too little, too late, and whether Pauline Hanson has already seized the agenda. From this side of the bar the answer is simpler than the headline. Labor has not changed the policy. It has changed the press release. Mass ...
There is a comforting explanation for Australia's increasingly bitter culture wars. The country became more progressive, its institutions naturally followed, and a noisy minority on the Right simply refused to accept social change. There is another explanation. The institutions moved faster than the people. That is the provocative thesis advanced i...
Suppose an Australian from 2026 could travel back exactly 125 years and materialise in Sydney or Melbourne in January 1901. He has come with a warning. He knows what will happen to the new Commonwealth: two world wars, Gallipoli, the fall of Singapore, the decline of Britain, the rise of America, the dismantling of White Australia, mass immigration...
Sir Richard Dearlove's lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation is not a climate-science paper. It is a security brief. A former head of MI6 is saying Britain has built an energy system that hostile states can squeeze, sabotage, or simply wait out, and that Net Zero, as currently practised, is part of how that system got there. That claim is...
"Thousands of migrants have charged through the streets of Ceuta, the North African enclave of Spain, as police attempted to move them to a new camp. The Mail has more. This is the moment thousands of migrants ran through the streets of the North African enclave of Ceuta as authorities tried to move them to a new tent camp. Spanish police today beg...
The supplement aisle is built on a simple pitch: if a little helps, a lot must help more. Labels shout 5,000 IU, 1,000 mcg, mega, extra-strength. That logic works for shoes and bandwidth. It does not work for nutrients. Most vitamins and minerals follow a U-shaped curve. Too little and you get deficiency. A band in the middle is where the body work...
Leith van Onselen's verdict (link below), on One Nation's latest immigration plan is refreshingly untheatrical: the core is decent, although the detail needs work. That is a better starting point than either "bombshell" or "racist." The argument worth considering is that Australia's enormous stock of temporary visa holders has become a housing, inf...
"He was going to die anyway" is the sentence that should stop us in our tracks, because it does not describe a special class of patient. It describes the human race. Applied to a desperately ill child, it can sound like mercy. Applied to your mother, the stranger on the bus or yourself, it becomes something else entirely. Once eventual death become...
Bjorn Lomborg's latest pass through the energy numbers is the sort of sentence that should end a thousand sermons and almost never does. In 2024 the world still drew about four-fifths of its primary energy from coal, oil and gas. On his accounting the share was 80.8 per cent, barely moved from 81.4 per cent in 2000. Absolute use is not fading. It i...
"Where hustle's the name of the game And nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain; There's been a load of compromisin' On the road to my horizon But I'm gonna be where the lights are shinin' on me …" Glen Campbell Rhinestone Cowboy (1975) If you wanted to design the least threatening figure in popular culture, you might come up wi...
A certain class of people needs an ending of the world the way a liturgy needs a last judgment. The subject changes; the posture does not. Carbon had a long run. When the public began to notice the subsidies, the aviation, and the coastal houses that somehow never moved inland, the apparatus did not dissolve. It changed costume. The new sacred emer...
The British state is not simply failing British women. In cases like that of Radiet Meles, an illegal who carried out two vicious sexual assaults, it is producing the conditions in which they are harmed and then treating the resulting outrage as the scandal. A genuine failure is a bridge that collapses under a load nobody foresaw. What Britain has ...
Big AI firms want a cartel. Does Artificial Intelligence pose a threat to humanity? Absolutely! But only assuming humanity is defined as "the billionaire owners of A.I. companies intent on crushing their competition." [Ed: I don't think that's the definition.] You don't need to be a super smart A.I. machine to know that large corporations love gove...
Socrates distrusted one of the greatest technologies human beings ever invented: writing. He wrote nothing himself. What we know of him comes principally through others, especially Plato. In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell the story of the Egyptian god Theuth, who proudly presents writing to King Thamus as an invention that will improve wisdom an...
If Ursula von der Leyen can invite Canada to become the European Union's first "associate member," then the only honest follow-up is: why stop at Ottawa? By the test she actually used: shared values, supply chains, Ukraine, critical minerals, a dislike of the present American president, Australia is sitting there with a better résumé and a worse co...
The Lindsay Clancy trial ended without a verdict, but what happened afterwards may tell us almost as much about contemporary America as the trial itself. Clancy admitted killing her three young children in January 2023. The issue before the Massachusetts jury was whether mental disease or defect left her legally lacking criminal responsibility. Aft...
Sir Walter Logie Forbes Murdoch was born on 17 September 1874 at Rosehearty, a fishing village near Aberdeen in Scotland, the fourteenth and youngest child of the Reverend James Murdoch, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He came to Melbourne with his family at the age of ten, attended Camberwell Grammar and Scotch College, and gradua...
The real question isn't whether the replacement is happening: it is, and the data shows it plainly. The question is whether it produces a functioning society or a low-grade permanent crisis that suits the people in charge just fine. The Sunday Times' figure is blunt enough that it should have forced a national argument and instead produced a shrug....
The headline alone is a chef's kiss of political awkwardness: the Prime Minister's own handpicked expert, the person chosen to lend credibility to the government's migration stance, ends up publicly endorsing chunks of Pauline Hanson's platform. That's the thing about expert panels: they're supposed to launder policy, not confess that the populist ...
