In 1910, a man named Abraham Flexner published a report that would do more to shape the practice of medicine in America, and then the West, including Australia, than almost any document before or since. It was commissioned by the globalist Carnegie Foundation, funded by the vast wealth of Andrew Carnegie, and it took as its subject the state of med...
For a generation the respectable line was that borders were a sentiment and labour markets were a mood. Add people, output grows, everyone is richer, and anyone who notices the man at the bottom of the wage scale is confusing arithmetic with vice. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has now said the forbidden sentence in public: supply and demand s...
Meditation has enjoyed an extraordinary rise in the West. Once associated primarily with Asian religious traditions, it has been transformed into a mainstream treatment for stress, anxiety and unhappiness. Meditation courses are offered by universities, hospitals and corporations. Mindfulness applications have millions of users, while psychologists...
The phrase "Digital Duty of Care" sounds almost impossible to oppose. Who could object to forcing enormous technology companies to make their products safer? Social-media platforms have deliberately engineered systems to maximise engagement, children have plainly suffered from some of those systems, and governments have every reason to ask wh...
The declaration that mothers should be "left out of politics" sounds like one of those civilising rules that everyone ought to accept. Andrew Hastie invoked essentially that principle in condemning Pauline Hanson's remarks about Anthony Albanese's late mother, and there is something admirable in the instinct behind it. Families should not automatic...
The Returned and Services League has decided that a One Nation cartoon about Andrew Hastie is "an attack on every veteran's service." That is not stewardship of the dead. That is a political organisation using the slouch hat as a veto. Pauline Hanson does not owe Canberra a retraction for that. Even if you grant every syllable of the complaint, the...
The Australian War Memorial exists because nations sometimes need places where argument stops. More than 103,000 names are recorded there, representing Australians who died in war and operational service. Charles Bean's original conception combined memorial and museum, but the moral centre of the institution was always commemoration. It was built s...
"In August of 2011, the British government—a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron—discovered just how tenuous its grasp on law and order really was. The most serious urban riots in a generation were kicked off by the death of a mixed-race man called Mark Duggan on August 4 in Tottenham, north London. Armed police intercepted...
There is a moment in the life of a community when the arithmetic stops being abstract. It stops being a statistic on a government spreadsheet, a number in a migration report, a talking point in a parliamentary debate. It becomes something you can see with your own eyes, walking down a street you have known your whole life, past shops that hav...
King's College London and YouGov asked a simple question and got an unfashionable answer. Thirty-four per cent of Britons believe there are parts of London where Sharia dominates and non-Muslims stay out. Thirty-six per cent say that is false. Nineteen per cent will not pick. The median guess for London's Muslim share is 35 per cent. The last censu...
Every generation likes to imagine that it invented rebellion. Young people distrust their parents, mock established conventions, experiment with forbidden ideas and congratulate themselves on seeing through the hypocrisies of the society they inherited. It is one of the oldest rhythms of cultural life. Something peculiar has therefore happene...
Twenty-five years on, New York City dumped more than 170,000 pages that had sat in 68 boxes in a municipal office. The anniversary timing is politics. The contents are not. They show a public story: the air is fine, go back to work, running beside an internal story of asbestos, benzene, alkaline dust, and officials who knew the two stories did not ...
A disturbing glimpse of that future appears in Anthropic's latest report on misuse of its Claude artificial-intelligence systems. The story has been reported under the provocative headline that Anthropic is building AI capable of predicting which activists police should watch. That description needs an important correction. Anthropic itself was not...
Nick Land's The Dark Enlightenment is one of those political works that is considerably more interesting than many of the people who denounce it have probably allowed themselves to discover. Originally appearing as a long sequence of essays in 2012 and 2013, and subsequently collected in book form, it takes the liberal democratic order and tu...
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...
