The bureaucratic blob can take all your money whenever it wants. By Alex Krainer.

A few months ago, American political commentator Nick Fuentes posted a video message about the U.S. government seizing his funds. Here’s what happened: one day he discovered that he had zero dollars in his checking account. He called his bank and learned that, “your account is under review and we can give you no other information.” Some two weeks later the bank gave him three telephone numbers to call, all belonging to U.S. attorneys working for the the U.S. Department of Justice. …

Fuentes learned that he was under investigation and the government simply seized $483,592.78 from his bank account. His statement is worth pondering:

“I called my lawyer and asked him, can I get my money back, is there anything I can do, do they have to release it? … And the response is, basically, they can take your money, they don’t need a reason, and they can keep it as long as they want and they don’t have to give it back. …

“All of that concentrated power that’s been built up in Washington DC is being rotated and turned inwardly and the kind of shock-and-awe that we saw in 2003 or 2001, Patriot Act, panopticon surveillance state, that’s now being wielded by politicians, bureaucrats, connected wealthy elite people and they can now wield that and utilize that against people with people of American citizenship. …

“People that have done nothing wrong, are not criminals, are not a threat to society, but people that are merely an inconvenience or a problem to powerful people. And so at that point, that’s the total end of a free society.” …

This is a radical departure from Anglo (or white) culture:

Part of “our values” and norms is that our property rights should be are sacrosanct. …

The government can’t just steal your property because they decided that you’re a bad person, that your political views are wrong, that you are a racist, an antisemite, a homophobe, a transphobe, an antivaxxer or a climate denier….

Of course, Fuentes isn’t the only victim of such government overreach. The number of cases probably count in thousands across Western jurisdictions. Another political activist in the U.S., Donald Trump’s friend Roger Stone also had his accounts frozen and balances seized. So did his attorney Rudy Giuliani.

In Europe, over 2,000 persons have been sanctioned since 2022.

What can you do?

It is important to recognize one obvious element to all these cases: the sanctioned persons had their bank accounts frozen. …

To defend our rights, it would seem that we have two choices: (1) to comply, conform and obey, or (2) to remove as much money as possible from the banks.

Being an obedient, compliant citizen may seem safe in the short term. However, this is exactly the gift that the blob demands of us, which enables it to devour the disobedient and the non-compliant one by one. Obedience only wins us the privilege of being devoured later. …

The next step should be to transact as much business as possible with small and medium sized, family-owned businesses, preferably in grey and black markets which are emerging or will emerge as a reaction to the blob’s abuse of our social contract.

Gold and bitcoin. Anyway, the inevitable overspending by governments always eventually makes their money worthless.

hat-tip Phil

John Cleese brilliantly explains modern leftism.

Some time around 1990 – 2010, extremists took over the left throughout the West. Cleese spotted it as it happened.

 

Europe is in trouble because it is overdoing the collectivism again. By Alex Berenson.

Update on Europe, The World’s Progressive Dream (TM), the place all those Gen Z ladies say they’ll move when they stop being too sad to get out of bed.

The Spanish government — loved by annoying lefties everywhere — just collapsed.

The French are doing what they do best, rioting.

In Germany, anti-immigration conservatives keep gaining ground.

Of the four countries that dominate continental Europe, only Italy has a stable government — a conservative government run by Georgia Meloni, which has now lasted longer than any other in Italy’s post-World War 2 history and which just banned burqas for students.

This trend is not accident or coincidence.

The heavy hands of the bureaucrats killed (legal) entrepreneurship:

French local and national government spending makes up 57 percent of the country’s domestic product. … Italy and Germany are at 50 percent. (The United States is at 38 percent.) [Australia 37.5%]

That stifling bureaucracy makes starting companies in Europe hard and growing them next to impossible.

The trend is most clearly seen in technology, where Europe is not even an also-ran. After being marginally competitive in early computing and software, it failed to adapt to the rise of Internet and social media companies. American policymakers and companies don’t even pretend to worry about its role in artificial intelligence.

Along with keeping new jobs from being created, Europe has gone out of its way to destroy the ones it already has. For over a decade, European environmentalists have pressed ruinous decarbonization efforts, leading to super-high energy costs and a loss of middle-class factory jobs to China.

France’s government is more controlling than the Soviet Union! By Michael Arouet.

Only one in three French people works in the real economy, two-thirds live, one way or another, off other people’s taxes.

They won’t vote for politicians who say France’s absurd pensions and overblown state spending are unsustainable, they vote for those who promise to lower the already low retirement age even further. …

France is cooked. There will be no serious reforms. … France is heading into a debt crisis that will hit the entire eurozone. … The situation is so bad that no nice options remain.

Europe is being killed in manufacturing too. By Michael Arouet.

Germans are not only more expensive than the Chinese, but also less productive and more often on sick leave.

Germans must become less complacent, and start working hard again, or the trend will accelerate and wipe out the German industrial base. Unfortunately, German left politicians and unions are mentally stuck in a world that no longer exists. They seriously demanded a four-day workweek without a pay cut for automotive workers. They will achieve a zero-day workweek instead.

 

Collectivists cannot stand competition, don’t acknowledge the unfairness of not rewarding people who work harder or better (“from each according to his ability, too each according to his need”), and always end up here:

At which point competition from less collectivist societies overwhelms them economically or militarily, and the overly socialist regime collapses.

Good European Dad. By Matthias Schmidt.

Just discovered my 19 year old daughter has an OnlyFans account

I was devastated

She clearly must not be registered as a sole proprietor with the the German Trade Office

I sat her down and asked how much she’d made

She said €4,200

I nearly collapsed

That’s at least €1,890 in unreported VAT obligations

She started crying but I did the only thing a good father could do

We spent the entire weekend filling out forms together

She’s now fully compliant with a business registration and tax ID

Makes €340/month after taxes and social contributions

I’ve never been more proud of her

Only 19 and already an online entrepreneur

She has a bright future ahead of her.

And they say that satire is not allowed in Germany.

The new covid??? By Jack Toledo in The Daily Mail.

The White House is monitoring a plague outbreak in Russia after a lab technician died and hundreds of people she came into contact with were placed in quarantine. …

The official explanation:

Darya Shipilova, 28, was reportedly working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia when she was exposed to pneumonic plague.

Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a test tube holding live bacteria, according to news outlet Lyudi Baikala.

She then became unwell while on a field expedition with colleagues … Shipilova was admitted to hospital on September 29 and placed on a ventilator but died two days later. …

Doubtful:

Mikhail Favorov, a senior Russian epidemiologist, dismissed the broken test tube explanation, according to the Moscow Times.

Favorov said: ‘It’s laughable. Someone working at the Anti-Plague Institute in Irkutsk wears a protective anti-plague suit.

‘If you break a test tube, the likelihood of infection is actually very low.’ …

Pneumonic plague is airborne, and fatal without antibiotics:

Pneumonic plague causes a severe lung infection, with symptoms including fever, shortness of breath and coughing up blood, which typically begin to show between three and seven days after contact.

Fatalities from pneumonic plague drop to around 17 percent if treated with antibiotics within the first 24 hours of infection.

However, the disease is almost always fatal if left untreated. ….

Pneumonic plague is one of three types of plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It is transferred as a result of breathing in airborne droplets from another person. …

Reports claim that drugs used to treat the disease are running out in the region, leaving terrified residents piling into pharmacies and medical facilities demanding supplies.

And why were they messing around with dangerous bacteria in the first place? Because it’s in Russia, at least I’m confident Fauci and co. weren’t funding it.

Costello wiped the debt, then Labor blew it. By Judith Sloan in The Australian.

When the current Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, brags about Australia’s relatively low government debt by international standards, Costello must surely be choking on his Weet-Bix. Look at the figures — it was all Costello; Labor has made it worse.

When Costello became our top money man, Australian government net debt stood at $96bn or 18 per cent of GDP. When the Howard government was voted out in 2007, net debt was minus $40bn or minus 3.4 per cent of GDP. It was a tour de force that was never supported by the Labor opposition. …

Let’s not forget that vocal advocacy for some of the government’s biggest current programs was around in Costello’s day — think here the NDIS, the Gonski school-funding model and the like. His firm response was “no”, followed by the obvious point that funding for disability, education and many other matters rests with the states. …

Annual government spending is now well over $800bn, having been less than $500bn before Covid. Government spending on the so-called “care economy” has risen by more than 50 per cent since the Albanese government was first elected. …

Chalmers: It hasn’t been done properly before:

As a firm believer in big government, Chalmers thought he had all the answers when he claimed he could reinvent capitalism. What he didn’t count on was the persistence of inflation and the role that excessive government spending plays in that outcome.

Debt, debt, debt — welcome to the next decade of politics:

The cost of government debt is about to escalate. He talks about boosting productivity but can only cite trivial measures while avoiding the main game – energy and industrial relations. We are stuck with sub-par economic growth and no way of escaping.

Alexander Downer in The Australian:

There is another cost that rarely appears in the announcement: what cannot be built because government has commandeered the people and materials. Engineers, electricians, concrete suppliers and construction machinery are not available in unlimited quantities. Public projects compete with private investment and, where their requirements overlap, with housing construction.

When governments accelerate enormous building programs in a constrained market, they drive up wages and material prices, delay other projects and make new homes more expensive. Announcing a housing target does not conjure another electrician into existence. …

Governments should stop promising to build everything simultaneously and then claiming some war thousands of kilometres away is the cause of prices rising! …

What is needed is a return to economic rationalism: rigorous assessment, realistic sequencing, transparent borrowing and the courage to defer projects that cannot justify their demands on the economy. The test of leadership is not whether a premier or prime minister can announce another project. It is whether they can explain why another worthy proposal must wait its turn for funding. …

Lionel Robbins famously placed scarcity and competing uses at the centre of economics [in 1932]. Politics does not suspend that reality. Winning an election does not increase the supply of skilled labour or repeal the cost of capital.

Some resources will always be scarce. After security, the main job of any state or economic system is to allocate those scarce resources.

Even in Elon Musk’s upcoming era of super abundance of material goods due to AI robots (won’t happen — there isn’t enough metal, for instance), the time of notable people will still have to be rationed, and houses with nice views will always be scarce. There’s always something.

US-UK special relationship is … over. By Brave AI.

All 12 B-1B Lancer bombers deployed to RAF Fairford in the UK returned to their home stations in the United States on October 4, 2026. This rapid withdrawal was prompted by a suspected Iranian-linked terror plot targeting the base, following the arrest of several suspects, including a British-Iranian dual national, for preparing terrorist acts.

The move was described as “highly unusual” for an allied air base in a peacetime country, with some aircraft departing before aerial refueling support was fully scrambled.

While the withdrawal strained the traditional “special relationship” between the US and UK — prompting commentary on the shifting dynamics of the alliance — the Pentagon emphasized that US bomber forces remain ready to deliver global strike capabilities directly from US soil.

Commenter:

During the Cold War I worked for the US Army & NATO. I visited & worked on British military facilities back then. When the Labour Gov released the terrorists threatening our bomber it caused our B-1s to retreat to the US. The relationship between the UK and US within NATO is now dead. Labour has sided with the radical Islamist in Iran and against the US and traditional Western civilization.

Glenn Reynolds:

As Britain — and most of the rest of Europe — look to become Islamist/Communist nations, the US will be reconfiguring, as it should. I assume we’re planning a way to take control of or eliminate their nuclear arsenals, too, if it comes to that.

The US can no longer base airplanes in the UK, because the UK is too Muslim to host them safely. Similarly, over the next few years the US will gradually withdraw its air forces from Europe. Iranian missiles have made US bases in the Middle East way too dangerous for hosting aircraft, except under huge defensive cover (e.g. in a carrier group).

Islamic violence has achieved what decades of leftist protestors could not — getting the USAF out of the UK. The left must be learning a lesson. Or perhaps it already has — for example, Charlie Kirk, Luigi Mangione, and the assassination attempts on Donald Trump.

The girl in the Cornell 7 fracas. By Keith Woods.

The young woman was a bit too woke and feminist, misjudged the opinion of her peers (is she on the spectrum?), then backtracked to recover her reputation.

She misread female social dynamics and expected there would be no “slut shaming” from the sisterhood if she did something sexually adventurous like an orgy.

The fact that she thought the men involved were gay/bi was added lib status, which as a pride “ally” she must have assumed would especially protect her from social shame. When she first noticed people were speaking negatively of the act, she text a friend words to the effect that this was part of the sexual liberation movement and “is going to become more common”

The timeline then seems clear: she was disinvited from a Halloween party because of the reputation she earned as a slut, which she then realised was a view not confined to bigoted men. When she read a comment of someone saying she was raped, she must have immediately clocked this as a possible out to absolve her of accountability and regain her social status. In her own account, she had never conceived of it in this way until she read it from someone else.

At that point, members of the sisterhood encouraged her suggestions that she was not actually responsible for anything.

“Slut shaming” still exists among sexually liberated women, but it is at odds with their professed beliefs about sexuality. Women are expected to pick up on this nuance and push for as much female power as possible while also enforcing shaming to discourage any individual lowering female sexual market value through extreme promiscuity.

But, the sisterhood has also built an out, and now any woman can just withdraw consent retrospectively, undo the wrong, and receive an even greater status as a victim.

Too bad about all the male victims of her change of mind. Female privilege?

Actress Criticizes Islam, Loses Her Career. By Robert Spencer at PJ Media.

The actress Selma Blair appeared in Cruel Intentions, Legally Blonde, The Sweetest Thing, and other movies, but on a fateful day in February 2024, she discovered what it was like to be a dissident in a totalitarian state. The totalitarian state in which she lived is known as Hollywood …

Blair became a nonperson because in February 2024, angry over the Israel-Hamas war and the support for Hamas among leftists and Muslim migrants, she wrote this on Instagram: “Deport all these terrorist supporting goons. Islam has destroyed Muslim countries and then they come here and destroyed minds. They know they are liars. Twisted justifications. May they meet their fate.” …

“The brands I worked with were gone within a day,” Blair recounted. “A few partnerships I’d spent years building were shelved. My agency was gone. My lawyer was gone. My publicist was gone. My book agent was gone. My book publicist was gone. My social media manager was gone. My son’s godmother was gone – my best friend. While some friends in the business quietly stood by me, most of them were gone. And of course, my manager, my supposed friend of 30 years, and a Jew, was gone too. I still don’t know what any of them were thinking. No one returned my calls.” …

She has apologized profusely since then, but her career has not revived.

And so in Hollywood, Selma Blair, having expressed views that dissented from leftist orthodoxy, no longer existed.

George Orwell would understand. In 1984, people who fell out of favor with the state became “nonpersons.”

Ostracism, both personal and professional, is one of the most potent weapons of the left. We saw it operating all the time when we lived in Canberra, particularly among feminists. Islam, of course, is more brutal — the punishment for apostasy is death.

The transformation of once mighty Canada. By Elizabeth Nickson from Absurdistan.

Canada is well ahead of Australia in these changes, so let this serve as a warning for Australia!

We cannot exist without American largesse. We have destroyed our economy so thoroughly we are beggars….

Canadians are a sleepy bunch, other than our immigrants who are roaringly ambitious and will succeed using the lovely talents they brought with them. Apparently in their cultures, recreational lakes are also abattoirs, toilets, and laundries.

Once almost crime-free and pristine, Canada is now a Cartel, Triad, fentanyl and human trafficking hub that launders most of the continent’s drug money. …

Every ‘race’ has a mob that steals everything not nailed down. Nothing is done to stop them. …

Socialism creates a crime ridden society. It’s the only way to survive. Everywhere it is tried, crime. One sub-continental Indian gang after another is caught, and set free. Chinese triads traffic humans right out of the Port of Vancouver, the largest port on the west coast of North and South America.

Nothing is done. We have murders on the street in Vancouver, once the most glorious Waspy city where families grew and thrived in peace among extraordinary beauty, and the only crime was committed by bored, drunk loggers. Now, it’s a filth bucket where women are attacked and raped in Stanley Park, and homeless tents and fentanyl addicts litter every public space.

Forty percent of our population is now immigrant. Around 60% of us — roughly — are supported by the government. Government work almost never produces wealth. Their work is either projected to bear fruit in the future, or is claimed as “safety” and “making things better”, as in regulation. I am not saying regulation is unnecessary, but to start a business in Canada means that at least 40% of your time is spent complying. So 60% of our energy, of the 40% of us who produce real goods, gets us down to about 30% of Canadians’ life energy producing anything that people actually want.

 

Trump Announces Plan To Annex Canada And Rename It ‘Gay North Dakota’ — The Babylon Bee

 

The glitch is that we need those goods that other people actually want to buy. As a consumer society we fail. We don’t have enough disposable income to buy the goods we produce, so unless the States takes those goods and does not tariff them, we are crippled. If we don’t tariff American goods 25-50%, as they come in, subsidized industry after industry will fail.

Anyone with vitality dreams of living in the States. …

Forty percent of GDP is eaten up by the government, and statisticians have added another 12-15% in excessive regulatory compliance costs. …

How do the globalists get away with this?

We are a fully engineered society, created, built, to be weak, pliant, obedient, hard-working and willing to settle for less.

And we have had forced upon us a set of “modern” values: socialism, feminism, an exhortation to express your worst sexual impulses, virtuous poverty, and giving everything away to people of color ‘cause we were mean.

All of these ‘values’ have been beaten into us by our 100% government controlled and subsided media, educational system and arts. Our public sector unions are a fetid mass of communists who act as opinion police, and a claque for the Communist Manifesto. If we transgress, like complain about excessive immigration, the RCMP visit. …

The shame:

Last week, Carney approved an LNG plant on our north-west coast which has been waiting for 25 years for approval. And called it a WIN! The rest of us laughed.

Last week we offed an 83 year old grandmother who was kicking and screaming NO to her last second. She declared her Christian faith. They called it cognitive decline. Why? Can’t afford our elderly. Time to DIE, comrade!!!!!

The rest of us? We hungry. Literally. 25% of us in the private sector choose between food and heat every month during our freezing winters. …

Will it come to this?

And then there’s Alberta. And Quebec. Both provinces have referenda coming up on separation. Dominion voting systems were invented here, so the likelihood of Ottawa allowing its cash cow, Alberta to leave Canada are very low. They will steal the vote, probably using Dominion tabulators and the anger will only rise.

Space X made 4,400 millionaires. By Brave AI.

SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO on June 12, 2026, turned roughly 4,400 current and former employees into millionaires overnight.

The wealth was distributed broadly across the workforce, not just executives. Employees ranging from welders and technicians to engineers and cafeteria workers benefited from SpaceX’s long-standing strategy of compensating staff with equity (restricted stock units and stock options) rather than high cash salaries.

Notable individual windfalls include:

• ~400 employees holding stakes worth $100 million or more.
• A former welder earning $28/hour who now holds equity worth nearly $1 million.
• An engineer with 12 years of tenure whose stake is worth over $13.5 million.

The event is widely described as one of the largest employee wealth-creation moments in corporate history.

Here is the US left’s new wunderkind, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

I’d rather have an economy that makes 1,000 millionaires than 1 billionaire.

Done.

It’s been a big week for SpaceX.

SpaceX has launched every rocket in their lineup, 3 different vehicles, from 4 different pads, in 3 different states this week.

They also lifted basically every “category” of payload. Starlink, Crew, Commercial, and Military.

October Surprise, 2026.

Wasn’t planning to mention this story, but the rape allegations on Cornell University’s campus has set the US ablaze — presumably as part of this election’s October surprise.

Democrats plan to gas up mentally ill females by highlighting the Clancy trial, the Cornell 7 story, and the execution of the first female inmate in decades is kind of ingenious but utterly destructive long term.

All of these stories are built on bald faced lies or lies by omission. Millions of dollars is being thrown at leftist online personalities and foreign bot farms to push it. I bet they highlight a few more before November. …

Don’t forget that Obama and his acolytes put these incredibly cynical and societal destroying political ops on steroids w/ the Trayvon Martin Hoax. In a just world, these bad faith actors would be put on trial in the public square and summarily punished. …

Leftist politicians are exaggerating and milking it already, even though it happened in 2024. For example, AOC makes WILD claims on Cornell 7: “Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman. They lured her into a frat house, drugged her with ketamine, and took turns gang raping her for seven hours.”

Contextual truth: The statement given by Jane Doe in 2024 states that she voluntarily used drugs, she engaged in consensual sex, and snapchat messages from Jane to the accused men have been revealed in which she doesn’t blame or accuse them of wrongdoing.

It is necessary for you to believe this young woman did not lustily agree to be gangbanged. By white males (also a brown one and an Asian one but never mind that.) Through the first Tuesday in November, anyway. …

They’re wagering that every GOP candidate will be asked about it by their media flying monkeys within the context of the lawsuit’s framing for the next 30 days. They’re also hopeful someone will say something incredibly stupid & crass about it, and win them a few days’ newscycle. …

Have you noticed the Cornell rape allegations have created far more outrage among women than the 250,000 British girls raped by Muslims. I wonder why that is?

Caitlin Flanagan at The Free Press:

The strongly felt and often poorly reasoned emotions surrounding this ghastly incident have grafted themselves so perfectly over those surrounding the Lindsay Clancy trial that the motor was already in third gear. There is a very large number of men who hate women and an equally large number of women who hate men. In all of my long life, I’ve never seen the sexes pitched against each other at this level of contempt, and it’s a frightening thing. Driving the rage of both sides is that the event appears to be neither a hoax nor a straightforward case of rape.

A huge number of men are still festering over the excesses of #MeToo. They feel that they let their guard down at the beginning, and they have steeled themselves against its return by regarding women with suspicion and contempt. Matt Walsh, the William Blackstone of X—always alert to the crimes of women and their most prudent punishments—has determined that women who commit rape “hoaxes” should be sentenced to the same amount of prison time that the defendant, if convicted, would have served.

Many men’s hatred of women is matched by an equal number of women’s mistrust of men; and the internet encourages both sides to give voice to their most extreme feelings. A lot of young women think this Cornell mess is going to light the match that burns down everything from sloppy police handling of rape accusations to the looming, powerful presence of fraternities.

It is not. …

The emotional thunderstorm won’t so much fade away as it will be replaced by the next red-hot call to climb in a tent and stop some other horrible practice. …

In the main, fraternity members tend to be many of the things college women don’t like: conservative, suburban, usually white, almost always straight. They stand for everything that campus chic stands against, and in particular, they stand against all that is holy to a majority of college women.

There ought, therefore, to be no problem keeping women safe from fraternities, which — as I have known for decades — are extremely dangerous places for them. And yet, year after year after year, young women of all political and ideological stripes flock to their parties, even though they know how dangerous those places are. …

That’s the saddest thing about these old rituals. What attracts women to those parties — late at night, like Jane Doe — to walk alone to a fraternity house and take her chances? What she’s really looking for is a man. And she has no idea how to find a good one.

Camille Paglia makes a critical point:

@dash_eats Paglia makes a parallel point to yours in a separate interview. https://t.co/WIJRkCsIm4

— Nate P. Hall (@Nate_PHall) October 2, 2026

Lacoon of Troy expands on Paglia’s point:

Paglia’s point is that women have been raised in a way that makes them naïve. They believe that the suburban, middle-class setting is the default condition of the world, and that the rights they have go with them anywhere, even to a foreign country or a bedroom during a drunken party. …

Written history is only about 2% of all human history. And this post-1945, “rules-based order” we’re living in is only about 2% of written history. And written history comprises things like mountains of skulls, banners made from the skins of enemies, torture as part of the legal system, defiled corpses, and cities given to soldiers for three days of rape and plunder with no rules.

The World Wars industrialized it. None of the progress of the 200 years of “enlightenment” prevented it, either. Keep in mind that Germany and Japan signed the Hague Conventions in 1899 and 1907. Paper rules burn easily. That’s what makes the “oh, we’ve evolved past all of this” argument a load of nonsense.

This postwar order, this illusory anomaly we’ve lived in for 80 years, was built by people who were scarred by two World Wars in 33 years. Orders are never permanent. Every previous order fell, and this one will too, except we’ll have drones and AI to make even bigger mountains of skulls next time.

And this is where Paglia’s statements become more important because in a real breakdown, the people with weapons and the will to use them will control the food, fuel, and shelter first. You know who does that the most? Men. The tech level doesn’t matter, either. It never has. From melee weapons, through missile weapons, to firearms, to drones, conflict has been the province of men. Testosterone and its resulting aggression reign supreme. They end up dominating everyone who doesn’t have resources, and eventually you get stability.

Do you know what’s downstream from that? Patriarchy.

That’s the irony facing the women that Paglia’s discussing here: what they despise the most is the only thing that will save them when this order is gone someday. If you don’t believe me, then look at how many patriarchal societies still exist in the world today, or read about the sack of Berlin in 1945.

Paglia is right: women should be treated as adults. And that includes women understanding what their rights are protected by.

UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond:

Anybody who’s being honest about the Cornell rape accusations needs to confront a basic fact about the way many young women in American society behave.

We are constantly exhorted to believe that intoxicated women are incapable of giving consent, and booze-lubricated sex should be considered rape.

But young women not uncommonly get drunk in public to disinhibit themselves and signal sexual availability. This gives them the get-out-of-guilt card that they’re nice girls, but the booze — or some guy — did it.

I’m not writing today to either approve or disapprove of that particular mating behavior. What I’m here to point out is that the no-drunken-consent scolds are being deeply dishonest.

This bullshit needs to stop. The pretense that intoxicated women don’t routinely put themselves in that state to collect sexual rewards is — hypocritical is just not as strong enough word. It’s corrosive.

It’s corrosive of trust. Corrosive of good morals. How can we expect young men to have any respect for what older adults tell them about sexual right conduct when we start by laying this whopper of a lie on them?

It used to be we could sort of tolerate this nonsense. But the corruption of the term “rape”, the removal of the assumption that physical coercion is involved, makes it much worse. A guy at a party has to deal with the possibility that the chick with booze on her breath who has obviously decided he’s her stud for the night might turn around and hit him with a “rape” accusation that will ruin his life a week later. Even if he was objectively as kind and loving and willing to take no for an answer as anyone could ask for.

Is this fair to anybody? It’s cruel to men, likely to make them angry and uncaring. It infantilizes women.

Wouldn’t happen under Sharia law.

Australia’s energy transition killed industry, renewables now 10% of primary energy. By Leith van Onselen at Macrobusiness.

Not exactly a spectacular success:

Remarkably, despite countless billions spent on subsidies for renewables, EVs and the like, renewables accounted for only 10% of Australia’s primary energy consumption in 2024-25, versus fossil fuels’ 90% share.

[Primary energy consumption is all the energy we extract from the environment. Unlike secondary energy (like electricity or refined gasoline) or final energy (what consumers actually pay for), primary energy accounts for the entire energy supply chain.]

If you examine the graph carefully, you will notice that total energy use has dropped since 2006. Energy use is a major indicator of living standards and GDP.

However, there was no mention of Australia’s deindustrialisation due to high energy costs, as evidenced by:

• Closing two oil refineries
• Closing the nickel industry
• Closing an alumina refinery
• Closure of fertiliser production
• Closure of glass production
• Closure of plastic resin production
• Stopping the production of paper

Indeed, the Australian Energy Update 2026 shows that Australia’s reduction in fossil fuel use has been driven by the downsizing and offshoring of Australia’s manufacturing sector.

As a result, Australia’s manufacturing share of GDP continues to shrink and is the lowest in the OECD at just 5%:

Duh:

I fail to see how deindustrialising Australia, exporting emissions to other nations with weaker environmental standards, and then importing goods back on ships burning dirty bunker fuel is saving the climate.

Because it certainly is not helping the economy or lifting living standards.

Without cheap and reliable energy, Australia has no manufacturing future.

Brilliant. We de-industrialized to help us achieve net-zero, but are still only at 10% renewables overall — and we were at 4% before we even decided to reduce carbon emissions, from hydroelectricity. Shame our ruling class don’t understand that science is more than whatever they make the taxpayer fund, and they were deliberately careless for not performing due diligence on the climate models (I did, it’s not too hard).

How to Fix Australian Universities. By James Allan in The Spectator.

This week I’m going to really depress readers, and especially those over the age of about thirty-five. You see, when it comes to our universities most people over that age really have no idea just how politically partisan, how massively over-centralised, how insouciant about standards and grade-inflation, how woke, how catering to any student’s claimed sense of vague unease, and how visa factory-like they’ve become. …

Driving out the conservatives:

Today’s universities have forsaken even a trifling commitment to diversity of thought and outlook on campus. They won’t admit this openly. But they do everything they can to drive conservatives away. They revel in giving every woke, progressive flag going its own prominent flagpole, a political decision if we’re being honest. Posters proliferate purveying the pro-Palestinian and transgender and ‘climate action’ and anti-One Nation causes. They indigenise the curriculum.

White men? Forgeddaboudit.

Despite females now making up near-on two-thirds of law students there remain various ‘affirmative action’ prizes or scholarships open only to women. There’s not a single one anywhere on campus directed solely at white, heterosexual men, not even poor working-class white men. …

Rankings driven by visas:

I can hear the overpaid vice-chancellors and uninformed politicians shouting, ‘What about all those international rankings showing Australia’s universities to be doing so well’? Short answer: these rankings are garbage — garbage in, garbage out. They treat numbers of overseas students as an implicit sign of quality. I’d say in Australia it’s related to our unis being part of the visa-getting production line….

You cannot have untold numbers coming in from abroad, paying big overseas fees and then fail all sorts of them. Nope. Instead, you dumb down. You require lots of group work where one or two local students get put into groups with the overseas students and carry the workload. …

So, how to fix Aussie universities:

I do not want to end as some sort of Cassandra. (Anyone graduated from an Aussie uni in the last decade will have to look up that reference.) A reforming conservative government could do plenty.

1. Cap the pay of vice-chancellors (and probably the entire Canberra civil service) at that of the prime minister.
2. Copy New Zealand and end completely all government grants to the social sciences and humanities …
3. End the over-the-top reporting back regulations Canberra imposes on universities.
4. Copy President Trump and force all universities to end all — yes, every single one of their — DEI policies. (And believe me, they are everywhere.)
5. Stop immediately the visa-getting Ponzi scheme that is the lifeblood of our bloated, overpaid university administrators.

What is Trump doing?

His administration has aggressively targeted DEI programs at universities through executive orders, funding threats, and lawsuits. On his second day in office, he signed an order to terminate DEI offices and positions “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” directing federal agencies to end “equity-related” grants and requiring universities receiving federal funds to eliminate such programs under threat of losing money. More than 50 universities were investigated for alleged racial discrimination.

In September 2026, the Treasury Department proposed a rule to strip private colleges of their tax-exempt status if they provide targeted help to students based on race

The Trump administration is cutting off federal student loan eligibility for higher education programs whose graduates consistently earn low incomes, a policy that disproportionately impacts humanities, arts, and social work degrees.

Taking notes, Australian conservatives?