One of the great mysteries of modern democratic politics is why governments so frequently refuse to implement policies that enjoy substantial public support. Elections are fought, politicians promise change, and millions of voters participate in the supposedly decisive process of choosing their representatives. Yet once the election is over, the fa...
The FDA has confirmed insertional oncogenesis involving a viral-vector gene therapy that uses the same category of DNA-delivery technology as Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID shots. In a major safety announcement issued November 6, 2026, the FDA revealed that DNA delivered by Zolgensma had integrated into patients' chromosomes in two tum...
The World Justice Project's 2026 Rule of Law Index records declines in 26 of the 40 European countries with comparable data since 2021. The four Nordic states that long topped the rankings, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, all lost ground, albeit modestly. The pattern is not confined to Europe. For the ninth consecutive year, declines outnumbe...
Look at the sequence. After midterms that gave Democrats fresh institutional leverage, the immediate signals were not a concrete affordability package or a growth agenda. They were subpoenas, investigations into private companies that worked with the previous administration, explicit talk of restraining advanced AI, and warnings that data-centre an...
A One Nation candidate recently argued that high levels of migration cannot substitute for the millions of potential Australians lost to abortion and chronically low birth rates, and that Australia should support its own mothers having children rather than relying on importing other people's. The claim drew immediate accusations of "great replaceme...
For years before COVID, "prepping" was treated as a punchline. Reality television turned people with extra cans of beans and a generator into spectacles of eccentricity or worse. National Geographic's Doomsday Preppers and similar programmes framed stockpiling as the hobby of the paranoid, the isolated, or the politically extreme. Media coverage of...
What does a man do when he has accumulated more money than he could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes? For most people, financial security, a comfortable home, a family and sufficient resources to enjoy life would constitute a remarkable achievement. But among sections of the Silicon Valley technological elite, the accumulation of billions of ...
On a Sunday night in Torquay, Victoria, a 60-year-old One Nation volunteer stepped outside his own home after a 14-year-old boy allegedly began damaging campaign signs on his property. What followed, according to police and party accounts, was an assault involving a baseball bat. A 37-year-old man and the teenager were arrested shortly afterward. T...
Somewhere in a dimly lit room, a person with too many monitors and not enough sunlight has just committed the most unforgivable crime of the decade. They have not stolen nuclear codes. They have not emptied a bank. They have done something far worse: they have made the ice cream soft! Across Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Estonia, superm...
Mathematicians are becoming increasingly concerned about artificial intelligence, and with good reason. For centuries, mathematics has been among the most prestigious intellectual disciplines, its practitioners enjoying an authority derived from the supposed certainty of mathematical proof. Philosophers may argue endlessly about truth, historians m...
There is something almost comical about the Australian Labor government's growing enthusiasm for regulating speech, satire and political expression. The political class increasingly appears to believe that ordinary Australians cannot be trusted to hear offensive opinions, encounter disturbing jokes or make their own judgments about controversial su...
Derrick Broze and Samuel Edward Konkin III have made important contributions to the modern movement for individual liberty, particularly through their advocacy of voluntary cooperation, decentralised economic activity and practical independence from the increasingly intrusive technocratic state. Their approach is refreshing because it does not depe...
No Savior is Coming to Save You I have been saying this for years, and I will say it again with even greater conviction after my latest conversation with John Bush: no politician is coming to save you. Not Trump, not anyone else. The savior complex that grips American politics is the single most destructive delusion of ou...
Imagine waking one morning to discover that your electricity has failed. You reach for your mobile phone (I don't use one), but the network is unavailable. The internet is down, electronic payments have stopped working, and the local supermarket cannot process transactions. At first, everyone assumes it is another temporary technical problem. The p...
Freedom of speech is frequently praised as one of the foundations of Western civilisation, yet governments throughout the democratic world appear increasingly willing to restrict it. The justifications vary. Sometimes censorship is presented as protection against misinformation, sometimes as a necessary response to hate speech, and increasingly as ...
Section 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 is presented as the necessary counterweight to section 18C. On paper it exempts artistic works, statements made for a genuine academic, artistic or scientific purpose, fair reports, and fair comment on matters of public interest, provided the act is done "reasonably and in good faith." In practice i...
Kylian Mbappé, French footballer, described a meme that placed his face on images of Mao Zedong as the one that made him laugh most. He called Mao a Chinese dictator. Chinese companies cut commercial ties. The foreign ministry declared that words hurting the feelings of the Chinese people would face unanimous opposition. Mbappé issued a grovelling ...
Donald Trump has reportedly not yet offered UFC boss Dana White the position of White House press secretary, some reports say it is a joke … but perhaps he should. It could be the greatest innovation in presidential media relations since the invention of the microphone. Forget carefully worded statements, diplomatic evasions and the tedious b...
There was once a time, not so very long ago, when an Australian could conduct an entirely respectable life without carrying a small electronic surveillance device in his pocket. He could work, pay taxes, maintain a bank account, communicate with government departments, attend university, travel on public transport and read whatever newspapers...
Australia has entered a remarkable new era of seeming technological progress. We have artificial intelligence, facial recognition, digital identities and computer systems capable of processing billions of transactions. Yet apparently we still have difficulty distinguishing an aged pensioner from a twelve-year-old child. Welcome to the wonderful wor...
