David Mamet begins his extraordinary essay Futility (link below), by saying that he does not know whether the United States will survive "in a form recognizable to my generation." The obvious temptation is to read this as another prediction of American collapse. Civil disorder, political polarisation, ideological extremism, institutional decay and ...

For most of the history of Western democracy, freedom of speech rested upon a proposition that was simultaneously dangerous and magnificent: ordinary people should be permitted to hear competing ideas and decide for themselves what they believe. Governments might hate what was being said, majorities might find it offensive, while churches, corporat...

Every few months Australians receive another announcement about GDP. The economy has grown by 0.4 per cent, 0.6 per cent or perhaps contracted by 0.2 per cent. Politicians celebrate when the number has a plus sign in front of it and explain the result away when it does not, while financial journalists dissect the decimal places as though the nation...

On the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were caught laughing together at Ground Zero while families read the names of the nearly 3,000 people murdered on September 11, 2001. The broadcast cut from a man crying over the memorial, face in his arms,...

Social media has recently been awash with claims that police in New South Wales now possess spyware capable of taking everything from a person's mobile phone: every message, every telephone call, photographs, contacts, locations and perhaps even material stored in the cloud. Some versions go further. They say police can do this whenever they stop s...

More than sixty years ago, George Harrison wrote one of the Beatles' most enduring political songs, Taxman. It was a furious little protest against a British tax system that Harrison had discovered could take an extraordinary proportion of a successful person's earnings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMdcE8jdz70. The song belonged to another coun...

The latest round of warnings from inside the artificial-intelligence industry, discussed previously at this blog, has gone considerably beyond the familiar claim that AI will take our jobs. Some of the people actually building these systems are talking about human extinction. That is an extraordinary claim. It deserves to be taken seriously precise...

"Lauren Edwards' assisted suicide Bill has been defeated by 286 votes to 270 in a major victory for opponents of the Bill, settling the issue in England and Wales for a generation after a two-year national debate. The assisted suicide Bill was opposed by the leaders of Labour, the Conservatives, Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats, while not a sing...

Anthony Albanese has a one-word answer for everything, and that word is "economy." When One Nation outpolled Labor's primary vote for the first time in June, the Prime Minister's response was a shrug dressed up as insight: "It's the economy, stupid." He argued that voters are struggling despite working hard, and that "many people feel that the syst...

The most reliable way to kill an idea is not to argue against it. It is to replace it with a ritual. When a practice stops being a means to an end and becomes an end in itself, when it is performed for its own sake, judged by its own internal criteria, and protected from outside evaluation, it ceases to be a method and becomes a cult. This is preci...

Twenty-five years ago, the world watched something it was told it understood. Two aircraft struck two towers. Three buildings fell. The official story asks us to accept that the second pair of events followed naturally and inevitably from the first. It asks us to believe that the most catastrophic structural failures in the history of high-rise con...

Australia treats superannuation like a civic sacrament. You do not question it. You contribute. You thank the priests in the industry funds. You wait until 60-something to touch your wages. Anyone who says "I'd rather have the cash" is treated as a heretic who wants old people eating cat food. That is not policy. That is religion. The compulsory sy...

The most fundamental duty of any state is not what its politicians imagine it to be. It is not the management of GDP, the refinement of social policy, the polishing of diplomatic credentials, or the endless theatre of parliamentary procedure. It is something older, simpler and vastly more consequential: the protection of the people who live under i...

For forty years, one scientific experiment has been repeatedly wheeled out to tell us something rather disturbing about ourselves: you think you make decisions, but your brain has already made them for you. Christians should be concerned. The experiment was conducted by the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet and his colleagues in the early 1980...

"Billionaires like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are racing to see who can conquer AI first – at all costs. They're treating the entire world as a laboratory, and we are their test subjects. But AI was built on our collective human knowledge and creativity. It should enrich humanity, not wipe us out. That's why a group of AI experts, technologists, arti...

Sydney Sweeney said the male gaze dehumanised her. Then she sold it back, harder. That gap is not a celebrity gotcha. It is a working model of how "modern feminism" talks about bodies, choice, and power when the invoice arrives. Let's take this nonsense apart. In March 2024, after the SNL circus around her body, Sweeney told Variety that constant s...

The irony here is delicious. As reported at Alex Jones: "Paula Devlin, a juror in the widely publicized Lindsay Clancy trial, joined "CBS Mornings" on Friday to share her experience taking part in the court proceeding that ended in a mistrial. When CBS host Gayle King asked about the age and racial demographics of the 12 jurors, Devlin said they ra...

With 62,000 people arrested for speech crimes in five years, the UK can no longer claim to be a free society, says Paul Birch. The state has learned to fear its people and will no longer tolerate them speaking freely. Many of us in Britain still flatter ourselves that we live in a free country. Although the UK isn't quite a police state (not yet an...

Pop psychology has sold us a compelling promise: if you dive deep enough into your own psyche, untangle every string of trauma, and audit your core values, you will eventually unlock your true self. We buy journal prompts, map out our archetypes, and analyse our personal identity with microscopic detail. Yet, despite this explosion of self-awarenes...

 There's a grim symmetry to the whole thing, and it deserves to be stated plainly. For years the climate-control apparatus trained its fire on livestock: methane from cattle, burps and farts measured, taxed, and eventually discussed as something to be engineered out of existence. New Zealand's government literally proposed a "burp tax" on farm...