Anthony Albanese went to the United Nations last week to talk about rules, middle powers, AI agents in government websites, and Australia's Digital Duty of Care. Last year's pitch was the under-16 social media ban, now copied in talking points by twenty-odd countries. This year's add-on is a broader duty on platforms: user control of feeds, ministe...

 Columbia's Wendy Walters has a book headed for the awards circuit: A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint. White paint, the pitch goes, is not a neutral coat. It is erasure, exclusion, the masking of power. The origin story is a "visceral dislike" of the stuff that she refuses to call irrational. Then come the exhibits: white supremaci...

There is an old political trick of turning an opponent's argument around and asking what assumptions have to be true for that argument to work. A viral compilation of interviews about voter identification offers an almost painfully good opportunity to do exactly that. Modernity.news asks provocatively, "Why Are White Liberal Women So Racist?" That ...

A Cambridge-linked team has just put a very large stack of papers through the mill: 1,279 studies, more than 600,000 people, 76 countries, three decades. The folk belief they were testing is the one that sells leadership books and HR modules: women are the emotionally intelligent sex. The result is not a clean rebuttal and not a clean confirmation....

       The jury system cannot survive moral illogic and the refusal of objectivity. It's difficult to assess the prevalence of the Clancy phenomenon, in which a female-dominated consensus, sentimental and vicious, formed swiftly around the alleged suffering and humanity of a woman who killed her three children in a premeditated ...

 In Greg Johnson's version of Animal Farm, the chickens labor mightily to create a being that is immeasurably smarter and more powerful than they are, on the assumption that this being will serve them. In a way, they were right, for when their new creation, "man," came online, he served his creators up for dinner. Let's call it Data Farm. "But...

A debate is opening on parts of the right that does not run through Bernie, DSA, or the ABC. Ted Cruz is still doing the Cold War lines: no, and hell no. Hunter Wallace at Occidental Dissent is doing the other ones: the GOP's capitalism talk is a dud, living standards feel worse, and "socialist China" has spent thirty years building ports, trains, ...

Mike Adams has invented the deliberately offensive term "Retardageddon" for what he regards as the intellectual collapse of Western civilisation. Strip away the provocative terminology and some highly questionable claims surrounding it, and there is an important idea underneath: a civilisation ultimately depends upon enough of its members retaining...

John Cleese has spent most of his adult life making people laugh at things they were not necessarily supposed to laugh at. Religion, class, nationalism, bureaucracy, sex, race, Germans, the British, foreigners, politicians and human stupidity have all passed through the Monty Python machine. Now, at the age of 86, Cleese has encountered something e...

Australia signed a 10-year Bilateral Security Agreement with Ukraine on 23–24 September 2026 on the sidelines of UN General Assembly High-Level Week in New York. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy formalised a framework for defence and security cooperation, accompanied by a further A$60 million package. Official figur...

There is something peculiar about the Australian immigration debate. We hold elections over tax cuts, electricity prices, Medicare and relatively minor changes to industrial relations. Yet one of the largest decisions a government can make: how rapidly the country's population should grow, tends to disappear into Treasury forecasts, visa categories...

Stanford has built a mouse whose forebrain is mostly not a mouse. Sergiu Pașca's group genetically cleared much of the developing cortex and hippocampus, about half the brain, then filled the gap with human organoids grown from reprogrammed skin cells. A few hundred thousand human neurons went into newborns. In two or three months the graft had mul...

A war against Pauline is the wrong war. Angus Taylor should not let Andrew Hastie's feud with One Nation become the Coalition's main event while Anthony Albanese is the one holding the Lodge. That instruction only makes sense if you still think the Liberals are in opposition to Labor. Watch what they actually do when Hanson rises, and the other rea...

Channel Nine sent a reporter to the United States, sat down with Thomas Robb of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and asked whether it was "heartening" to see "anti-immigration Pauline" doing well in Australia. He said yes. The clip went into a documentary about Trump's divided America. Pauline Hanson called it disgusting and a new low. Barnaby Joyc...

Michael Snyder has been predicting economic and geopolitical disasters for so long that regular readers know to apply a discount to the apocalyptic language. But his latest "perfect storm" argument deserves attention because its central point does not depend upon believing that the end of civilisation is arriving next Tuesday. Something unusual is ...

Something extraordinary happened to Australia's Medicare system in June, although fortunately the immediate consequences appear to have been minor. An artificial-intelligence agent developed by OpenAI was given what Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has described as a "benign" research task. It was looking for publicly available information about Aus...

The Advertiser story (linked below), is real for most people. South Australians are cutting work hours and social spending as petrol sits near record highs. The quote that does the work is the one we should remember: whoever gets us the cheapest fuel gets my vote, a shot across Albanese's bow from people who have decided the tank is the ballot. Tha...

There are few phrases in politics more powerful than "protect the children." It immediately establishes the moral terrain. Who, after all, wants children exposed to pornography, grooming, cyberbullying, encouragement of suicide, eating disorders and the other genuine horrors available online? Australia's proposed Digital Duty of Care begins on prec...

Politicians make many grand claims for renewable energy. But simple arithmetic shows the 'energy transition' is doomed to fail, says Richard Lyon, whose new book, The Energy Trap, is out today. Every reader of this site knows the moment. You're three sentences into a reasonable question about energy policy, the cost of it, the pace of it, whether a...

The clip making the rounds this weekend is short. Bill Gates, on Meet the Press, is asked whether AI is powerful enough to end humanity. He does not say yes. He says something almost as blunt: AI is "certainly powerful enough to drive events that… cause a billion deaths." There has never been, he adds, a weapon as powerful as "people with ill inten...