America [and all of the West] has become a claims economy.
Financial assets at nearly 7x GDP means the value of paper claims on the economy has outrun the economy itself. Stocks, bonds, private equity, credit, derivatives, real estate-linked securities, retirement accounts, fund structures, and financial instruments now tower over the productive base that must ultimately support them. …
The country still produces goods and services, but the dominant wealth engine is no longer labor income. It is ownership of claims. Claims on profits. Claims on rents. Claims on interest. Claims on future growth. Claims on government support. Claims on monetary expansion. Claims on the purchasing power of tomorrow.
Two classes:
That changes the class structure. …
Workers depend on wages from the real economy. Asset owners own leveraged claims on the real economy. When the system expands financial values faster than output, the owner class compounds away from the wage class even if the country as a whole still looks rich.
This is why the wealth gap keeps widening. The main escalator is asset inflation. Anyone standing on it rises. Anyone paid in wages has to chase it from below.
After the GFC of 2008, the asset class moved ahead much faster:
The QE era was the accelerant. Near-zero rates turned distant future cash flows into enormous present values. Buybacks rose. Private equity multiplied. Venture capital inflated. Housing repriced. Bonds rallied. Tech multiples exploded. Every asset with duration got lifted. The worker got a paycheck. The owner got revaluation.
Globalization added another layer. NAFTA, China WTO, outsourcing, supply-chain arbitrage, cheap goods, margin expansion, weaker labor bargaining power. Corporate profits capitalized higher. Financial assets absorbed the upside. The wage base absorbed the pressure.
Now assets and their owners run the political system, too big to fail or even to discipline
Now the system is trapped by its own financial tower. When asset values reach this size relative to GDP, policymakers cannot allow a full clearing without threatening pensions, banks, retirement accounts, tax receipts, collateral chains, private credit, housing, and political stability. The asset stack becomes too large to discipline honestly.
That is the hidden regime.
The economy serves the balance sheet now. Rates, liquidity, fiscal deficits, bailouts, regulatory treatment, Fed reaction functions, all orbit around preventing the asset tower from falling onto the real economy beneath it. …
The worker still produces the world, but the upside is increasingly captured by whoever owns the paper, the equity, the platform, the debt, the property, the fund, the scarcity.
“Own assets or be left behind” is brutally true.
The darker truth is that the system now requires that sentence to be true.
If you take a small Pacific Island with a population of 10,000 and you bring in 25,000 Chinese workers and give them citizenship, is it still a Pacific Island culture? While an exaggeration for clarity, this is, in essence, the question being asked by Australians regardless of whether or not politicians want to address the concern. …
This is not to say that Australians are against migration, only that when you have too much migration a country ceases to be the country it was in every way that matters. …
If you live in a city such as Sydney or Melbourne, Aussies of colonial descent are now a minority in various parts of the CBD. Is it right that people feel like tourists in the centre of their civilisation? Should you be surrounded by people who do not speak your native language at home or observe your customs? Is it not your city?
When Tony Burke was born, Sydney’s foreign-born population was 22 per cent. Today, it is 43.2 per cent. In some areas of the CBD, it is up to 78 per cent. I walk it every day. It no longer feels like my home.
We hear the Left talk of the horror of colonisation. How is this not a form of colonisation?
Then, in a completely random and unprovoked attack, a Somalian Muslim named Mohamud Ali rushes up to you and stabs you in the face and neck, trying to kill you (all allegedly).
You are now in Royal Melbourne Hospital’s emergency department in a serious but stable condition.
That’s the reality of life in “multicultural” Melbourne in 2026.
Commenters:
Doesn’t happen in Japan or China. …
This is exactly why after 20 years in emergency medicine, I am done and will never hold certification again….
The leftist judges will find him incompetent to stand trial due to having 40IQ. He’ll be set free on a mental health supervision order.
If you trusted “settled science” throughout history, you’d have:
– Drunk radioactive water for vitality (1920s)
– Had your healthy teeth pulled to cure mental illness (1910s)
– Smoked cigarettes for your throat, on doctor’s orders (1940s)
– Taken heroin for your child’s cough (1890s)
– Eaten lead paint chips as a calcium supplement (decades of this)
– Used asbestos to insulate your child’s bedroom (1950s)
– Given thalidomide to pregnant women for morning sickness (1960s)
– Eaten margarine for your heart (1970s)
– Lobotomised your sister for being unhappy (1940s and 50s)
– Sprayed DDT on the children in the playground (1950s)
– Avoided all fat to lose weight (1990s)
– Replaced butter with trans-fat spreads on the doctor’s recommendation (1990s)
Every generation has its medical catastrophe dressed up as health advice. Endorsed by the experts. Printed in the textbooks. Recommended by your doctor. Featured on the front of the magazines in the waiting room.
Ours is seed oils, statins, grain-based diets, ultra-processed convenience food, and the steady chemical maintenance of conditions that better food would resolve in 90 days.
Future generations will look back in horror. Just like we look back at radioactive tonics and cigarette prescriptions and wonder how anyone fell for it.
Now we are told to take statins, vaccinate our children, inject experimental RNA-modifying spike protein factories into our bodies, avoid nicotine and alcohol, and cure cancer with chemotherapy.
And the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. Or that “the science” insisted that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, as late as 1905, two years after the Wright brothers flew.
And the list above fails to mention that for 90% of the last two thousand years, the main cure for almost any ailment was blood letting.
This massive cost is predicted for high-risk individuals who may require 24-hour surveillance by two police or security personnel. …
Authorities warn that any prosecutions or court‑ordered supervision would add further costs to the public purse. …
Estimated monitoring costs are based on similar cases in NSW, where convicted extremists were placed on Extended Supervision Orders by the Supreme Court after judges found they posed an ‘unacceptable risk’ to public safety.
$2m per year? Presumably. That’s enough to employ eight people to watch one of them, 24/7, after on-costs and the usual material and admin support. Two people surveillance for 168 hours a week is eight 42-hour workweeks.
A team led by developmental biologist Teruhiko Wakayama took a single female mouse in 2005, cloned her, then cloned the clone, then cloned the clone of the clone, and kept going for two decades. … More than 1,200 mice produced. Fifty-eight generations from that single original donor. …
Generation 58 was the last. Every mouse born from it died within days.
The study was published in Nature Communications on March 24, 2026 (Wakayama et al., Nat. Commun. 17, 2495), and the results are worth walking through carefully, because they have implications that reach considerably further than the cloning industry.
For the first 25 generations, everything looked fine. The cloned mice were healthy, had normal lifespans — about two years, which is standard for a lab mouse — and the success rate of the cloning procedure was actually improving. At one point, the researchers themselves speculated that serial cloning might be sustainable indefinitely.
Then the success rate started dropping. By the 57th generation, the birth rate had fallen to a fraction of a percent. The genome sequencing told the story: approximately 3,700 single-nucleotide variants and 80 insertion-deletion mutations had accumulated across the lineage, averaging about 69 new mutations per generation — roughly three times the rate you see in sexually-reproduced mice. The frequency of deleterious mutations had nearly doubled. Some animals had lost an entire X chromosome. Others showed translocations — pieces of chromosomes breaking off and reattaching to the wrong partner.
By the 58th generation, the accumulated damage was lethal. The mice looked physically normal at birth but were too broken at the genomic level to survive.
Why cloning is genetically lethal in the not-so-long term:
What the Yamanashi team documented over twenty years is a textbook demonstration of a concept called Muller’s Ratchet, proposed by the geneticist Hermann Muller in 1964. The idea is simple: in any lineage that reproduces without sexual recombination, deleterious mutations can only accumulate. They never get removed. The ratchet turns in one direction — toward deterioration — and it never turns back.
In normal sexual reproduction, two parents contribute DNA, and the resulting offspring gets a shuffled combination of both. This shuffling does two things: it occasionally concentrates deleterious mutations into a single unlucky offspring who fails to reproduce (purging the bad variants from the population), and it occasionally produces offspring with fewer deleterious mutations than either parent. The net effect is that sexual reproduction acts as a quality-control mechanism, keeping the genome roughly stable over time.
Remove the shuffling, and you remove the quality control. Every copying error persists. Every mutation that doesn’t immediately kill the organism gets passed to the next generation, along with whatever new mutations that generation accumulates. The genome doesn’t improve. It doesn’t even hold steady. It deteriorates, generation by generation, until the accumulated damage exceeds whatever threshold the organism requires for viability. …
It gets worse — more empirical evidence:
The most interesting result in the Wakayama study isn’t the collapse. It’s what happened when they tried to rescue the dying lineage.
The researchers took female mice from the 50th and 55th generations — deep into the damage zone — and mated them with normal, sexually-reproduced male mice. The first generation of offspring was still somewhat compromised: smaller litters, the characteristic oversized placentas that plague cloned animals, and some of the accumulated genetic problems. But the grandchildren — just two generations of sexual reproduction later — were completely normal.
Two generations. Twenty years of accumulated genetic damage, reversed in two generations of sex.
That sounds like great news for sexual reproduction, and it is. But think carefully about why it worked, because this is where the result connects to something larger. …
The sexual recombination between a damaged clone and a healthy male allowed the offspring to inherit clean copies of the genes that had been corrupted in the clonal lineage. The damaged variants were either not inherited or were masked by functional copies from the father’s side. By the second generation, the worst of the damage had been shuffled out.
The key phrase in that explanation is one side of the pairing was genetically healthy. Here is the key phrase: The reset required a clean genome to reset against. …
Where are humans, now?
The human genome is frozen.
The selective turnover of the human population has collapsed by a factor of 35 from its Neolithic baseline, and by a factor of 44 from its Paleolithic baseline.
Nearly everyone born today survives to reproductive age. Nearly everyone who reproduces successfully raises offspring who survive to reproductive age themselves.
The differential survival and reproduction that natural selection requires in order to operate has been almost entirely eliminated by modern medicine, modern sanitation, and modern food systems.
This means the gene pool is effectively frozen in place. Beneficial alleles cannot spread because there is no differential reproduction to spread them. The same mechanism that prevents beneficial change also prevents the efficient purging of deleterious mutations. The sieve that kept the genome clean for hundreds of thousands of years has been switched off. …
The cloning experiment represents the extreme case. … No recombination. No selective mixing. No error correction of any kind. Pure copying, generation after generation, with every error preserved and compounded. Result: genomic collapse in 58 generations.
Modern humanity represents a less extreme but structurally identical situation. We still have sexual recombination — the shuffling mechanism still operates — but the selective component that makes recombination effective at purging damage has largely been disabled. Recombination can concentrate deleterious mutations into a single individual, but if that individual survives and reproduces anyway because modern medicine keeps them alive and modern society ensures their offspring survive, the purging doesn’t happen. The mutations stay in the population.
Remember the two-generation reset from the Wakayama experiment. It worked because the healthy males came from a population where selection was still operating — where loaded individuals were still being removed. That’s the critical ingredient, and it’s the ingredient that’s disappearing. …
The reset mechanism is still technically present, but it’s operating at roughly 3% of its historical power. The sieve has holes in it so large that almost everything passes through. …
Doom:
Every generation, each human being is born with approximately 70 new mutations, of which roughly 2.2 are meaningfully deleterious. For the entirety of human history prior to about 1900, those deleterious mutations were balanced by purifying selection — loaded individuals dying before reproduction, or reproducing less successfully. The genome stayed roughly stable because the input of new damage was matched by the selective removal of old damage.
Since 1900, the input has continued at the same rate. The removal has effectively stopped. We are accumulating approximately 2.2 new deleterious mutations per person per generation, and we are no longer removing them.
Five generations have passed since the collapse of [selective turnover] began in earnest. Five clicks of a very slow ratchet. The Yamanashi mice made it to 58 clicks of a very fast ratchet before extinction. We’re not mice, and our ratchet isn’t turning as fast, because we still have recombination even if selection has been hobbled. But the direction of the ratchet is the same, and it doesn’t turn backwards on its own.
This is a (or perhaps the) major reason that average IQs in the West have been dropping by about a point per decade since 1880 (once the test-taking artifact that gave rise to the Flyn effect is accounted for). In reverse, it is also the reason that average IQs grew from the dark age to 1880.
What eats most acidly into the heart of our state is the criminality of a single union: the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union. … Its criminality is slickly organised and it has been penetrated by outlaw motorcycle gangs as it oversees worksites around Australia with mafia-like command and control — and in a true mafia style even trafficking drugs. Criminals are given positions on worksites and then employ their mates as they stand over construction companies holding them hostage and stripping them of not millions, not tens of millions, not hundreds of millions but thousands of millions of dollars. Just in Victoria.
There have been calls for a royal commission into the CFMEU, but [Victorian Premier Jacinta] Allan won’t have it. …
Investigator Geoffrey Watson SC, who was commissioned by recently resigned Mark Irving KC, the administrator of the CFMEU’s construction and general division, to examine the union, found it was a criminal enterprise that had stolen or diverted about $15bn from Victorian taxpayers. …
Watson said it “was no longer a trade union, it was a crime syndicate” that had converted building sites into “drug distribution centres”. It is a uniquely Victorian problem. He said if you compared corruption around the states on a scale of zero to 10, “NSW is about a two or a three, Queensland’s about a five, and Victoria’s about 1000. It’s insane.” …
It is hard to imagine what $15bn means … No wonder we can’t afford to fix potholes, properly fund hospitals or pay for a fully functioning police force. …
Spiraling downwards towards third world behavior:
I have called Melbourne home since 1958 and I have never known a city to be so paralysed by hopelessness. World’s fourth most liveable city? That ranking mocks us. We used to be so content in our little southern paradise the car number plates stated “The place to be”. Now it is the place to be stabbed. Recently a sushi chef on her way to work was stabbed by a complete stranger at 7.40am in the CBD.
Melbourne’s children are stabbing, slashing and killing each other. We are so hardened to the numbing uniformity of crime by children who should be in bed but instead steal cars and attack and rob people, it soon drops from the news agenda.
Our children are the most violently criminal in the country. Morning radio bulletins carry news of savage home invasions, machete attacks and cars stolen and crashed by drivers not long out of primary school. Sometimes they or their passengers are found dead in the wreck. …
Last September the news was worse: two boys, aged 15 and 12, walking home from a suburban basketball game were stabbed to death by a gang of youngsters. One of the dead boys had his hand sliced off. Prosecutors say the boys’ deaths were revenge for another boy’s murder nine months earlier. That victim also had his hand chopped off. …
The number of police has fallen to 15,601 full-time officers, the lowest for seven years. Since then the state has grown by more than 500,000 people and the crime rate has exploded. The Police Association believes we are more than 1400 officers short. But too few want to be a police officer in Victoria. Who can blame them? Another 150 have left in the past three months.
The money stolen or diverted by the CFMEU — traditionally one of Labor’s biggest donors — would cover the total Victoria Police budget for years.
Children’s courts deal daily with a tidal wave of youngsters charged with serious violent crime. The gang culture in the city is so vicious that one of the courts is festooned with security cameras — focused on the streets outside and beamed inside. Those about to be bailed are able to see if enemy gang members are waiting for them. One boy must know those cameras well; he has been bailed more than 50 times. He has had 388 charges struck out. He breaks into houses while families are asleep, steals money and cars that he often crashes. But we’re good with it, apparently. He is reportedly here on a refugee visa. No doubt he’ll make a fine Victorian citizen if he lives long enough. …
This complete contempt for law and order is aided and abetted by a criminal justice system that refuses to punish its citizens even for edge-of-life violence. The sentencing of criminals in Victoria is absurdly lenient and has been for years.
Victoria’s hospitals are underfunded, understaffed and overcrowded, and run up huge debts in a system so stressed and demanding that patients are attacking doctors, nursing staff and each other.
This is insane!!! 😳😳😳😳. but you know what, good!! People need to understand the fakery and understand how important real life connection is. Not online fakery. pic.twitter.com/K8PUapLgz0
— leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ (@LeilaniDowding) May 1, 2026
A leaked 2004 Home Office memo to the Telegraph shows Tony Blair’s team admitting mass migration was a growing concern for people, so they hatched a secret plan to make it more “popular.”
Blair’s team pushed a different PR approach, to reframe dissent as racism… in order to smother debate and complaints.
They knew, they did it anyway… even when you voted against it repeatedly
In 2009 Andrew Neather, an advisor to Blair, Straw & Blunkett disclosed how their Labour government were using mass immigration to socially engineeer a multicultural UK and ‘rub the rights nose in diversity’.
The argument that immigration was needed for economic reasons was simply an excuse to avoid alienating its ‘core working class vote’.
Commenters:
I watch BritBox and SwedishNorwegian crime series. Every drama has an “innocent hard working Paki,” etc who’s been abused by some brutish white yob who turns out to be a racist criminal.
Like” The Sum of all fears” with Ben Affleck. 180 degrees, delete Arab insert South African whites. …
‘Social engineering at work: weaponize moral language (“racist,” “bigot,” “islamophobe,” “anti-semite,”) to isolate critics, protect the multicultural orthodoxy. Wear down opposition until people self-censor or burn out. It creates the “useful idiots” who sensor/erode any debate. …
This is how the modern establishment works across all it’s arms. Politics, MSM, defence and intel, film and entertainment, social discourse. All disagreement or dissent is instantly reframed as an ‘ISM. Modern shorthand for Blasphemy. …
Tony Blair deserves the North Korea punishment: 3 generations of his family pay the price for his crimes.
2007/2008 Obama invited Tony Blair to a breakfast event that was on CNN. I caught it in an airport, and Obama introduced him as “the man that showed us the way.”
Then every other woke leader in the West copied Blair and Obama, and flooded their electorates with third world immigrants:
Consequences? Only extinction.
Tony Blair’s Britain is winning the civilizational Darwin Award:
The Darwin Awards are a rhetorical tongue-in-cheek honor that … recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool by dying or becoming sterilized by their own actions.
“The first Americans saw themselves as free men carrying the forward and central liberties and ancient rights of the Anglo-Saxons into this new and beautiful world!”
“In the eyes of America’s founders, our war of independence was fought not to reject this heritage, but to reclaim it and perfect it.”
“As the founding father, George Mason, wrote, we claim nothing but the liberty and privileges of Englishmen in the same degree as we had still continued among our brethren when we were in Great Britain.”
🚨 TRUMP JUST WENT FULL WESTERN CULTURE MODE WITH THE KING
“The first Americans saw themselves as free men carrying the forward and central liberties and ancient rights of the Anglo-Saxons into this new and beautiful world!”
Why everyone want to live in a country with a high average IQ. By Heretical Insights.
Warning: Insightful but a little long (you should see the full article!).
For most of modern economic history, … workers moved from low-productivity regions to high-productivity ones, reallocating labor toward areas where it was most valued. … People left stagnant regions because opportunity lay elsewhere.
In recent decades, however, this mechanism has weakened, and in some countries, reversed outright … Across much of the Western world, people are moving away from economic centers. Instead of moving to where their skills are at a premium, citizens of these countries flee them in droves.
At first glance, this is baffling, like watching water flow up a hill. But a look at the list of anomalous countries suggests an explanation: Third World immigration.
Third World immigrants move to the productive areas, then natives move out due to wage suppression and housing overcrowding:
Immigrants do not disperse randomly across space. They concentrate in areas of economic opportunity, especially so if preexisting ethnic networks are already present to help facilitate the settlement, which usually means major metropolitan centers. As immigrants disproportionately settle in high-employment areas, they absorb a substantial share of local labor demand. This reduces the expected returns for natives who might otherwise move into these regions …
When immigrants arrive, they do not simply add to local labor supply. Some native competitors exit, reducing supply contemporaneously, while others never arrive in the first place, reducing future supply in a way that is harder to observe. Wage suppression is therefore partially masked by native displacement…
Then there is culture:
More natives are leaving productive areas than would be predicted by housing pressure or congestion alone. Something else is at work. That something is immigrant behavior. …
Large inflows of culturally distant, low-trust populations often degrade local living conditions in ways that are not well captured by standard economic models.
Crime is the most obvious channel, but far from the only one.
Political conflict, incompatible norms, misuse of public space, noise, litter, and simple dissatisfaction with becoming a minority in one’s own neighborhood all contribute to native exit. In the United States this process is often mislabeled as “white flight”, but it is neither exclusively white nor uniquely American.
Nor does it require high crime. Even affluent, low-crime immigrant groups can induce native outmigration by transforming institutions. West Coast Asians, for example, have dramatically intensified educational competition, raising the grind associated with schooling and driving native flight from public school districts. …
Early 20th-century Ellis Island immigration did not produce anything resembling white flight. Native-born Americans did not abandon New York, Boston, or Chicago en masse despite dramatic demographic change. By contrast, contemporary California, London, and New York City have seen absolute declines in native populations. The greater the cultural, behavioral, and normative distance between newcomers and locals, the stronger the incentive for natives to leave.
Experience increases dislike:
The standard optimist’s reply to this is simple: “give it time”. Any tension we see now is just a “phase”. As people intermingle, they’ll get used to each other, fear will fade, and prejudice will melt away through everyday contact. This idea sits at the heart of a large chunk of the social sciences, but the empirical support itself is far more lacking. ,,,
Leeuwan et al. (2023) conducted four studies examining whether exposure to immigrants attenuates the relationship between disgust sensitivity and opposition to immigration. It does not. Exposure had no meaningful mediating effect.
Another study found that in Europe, “direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies” (Hangartner et al., 2018)….
History offers little solace. During the Second Great Migration of American blacks from 1940 to 1970, Boustan (2017), examining 70 U.S. metropolitan areas, found that for every black family moving into a central city, roughly two white families moved out. And the long-run attitudinal effects persist to this day. As Vuletich et al. (2023) show, counties that received larger black inflows historically exhibit higher implicit racial bias among white residents today. …
The most optimistic evidence comes from a recent meta-analysis of forty-one preregistered experiments. Lowe (2025) finds that intergroup contact does, on average, reduce prejudice. But the magnitude is vanishingly small (about one tenth of a standard deviation). More importantly, the effect operates predominantly at the interpersonal level. Contact changes how people behave toward the specific individuals they have interacted with, less so how they perceive the outgroup as a whole.
Winners and losers:
In nearly every wealthy country, locals are more skilled than immigrants. When skilled natives are driven out of high-productivity regions by overcrowding and poor behaviors of unskilled (and often economically inactive) immigrants, the national economy suffers. Labor is misallocated away from places where it generates the most value, and aggregate productivity falls below the counterfactual. …
Internal migration has historically been one of the primary engines of upward mobility. The canonical story of “ambitious country kid moves to the big city to better himself” has largely disappeared in high-immigration Western countries. That pathway has been appropriated by immigrants themselves. The beneficiaries of urban productivity are no longer natives seeking opportunity, but newcomers displacing them. ….
Because immigrants cluster in high-productivity areas, and because their presence drives natives out, immigrant incomes are artificially inflated relative to natives.
In Britain, ethnic minorities are overrepresented in London by roughly a factor of three. London’s productivity is about 50% higher than the rest of the country. Were it not for immigration-induced native displacement, white British incomes would be higher and minority incomes lower than observed. Fiscal and income comparisons therefore substantially understate the true cost of immigration relative to natives.
More bulls**t from the globalists:
The pattern of internal migration is also evidence against one of the more sophisticated arguments for mass immigration, which goes something like this: even if immigrants raise the cost of housing, compete with native workers, and strain the welfare system, they provide large economic benefits through indirect channels. Specifically, they free up skilled natives to focus on more complex work, boosting economic growth through specialization of labor. …
While this argument is possible in theory, the actual behavior of natives suggests that this is not the case in practice. If it were, domestic migration should flow towards concentrations of immigrants, not away….
Revealed preferences — everyone wants to move to countries with high national IQ:
You’d also expect to see a very different trend in international migration, if the argument was true. Skilled workers from the First World would move to the Third World to take advantage of the allocative benefits of low-skill labor and because “higher IQ would be in greater demand”. Someone who might be a cashier in the U.S. could move to Brazil and enter the upper-middle class. Westerners would take advantage of the relatively greater IQ premium by moving to South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa en masse. But instead, the unambiguous pattern we see is that of Third World elites moving to the First World.
The reason for this is because more intelligent populations generate large, compounding externalities that operate well beyond individual earnings.
Higher cognitive ability improves competence in complex roles, facilitates innovation, enables large-scale cooperation, and raises economic literacy, all of which scale socially rather than merely individually. The result is that the effect of national IQ on national income is several times larger than the effect of individual IQ on individual income (each IQ point is associated with a 2–3% increase in individual income versus a 6–8% increase in GDP per capita).
In other words, high intelligence has large positive externalities and low intelligence large negative externalities.
National IQ is positively correlated with almost everything good and negatively correlated with almost everything bad. We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the single best predictor of GDP per capita, and conditional on GDP per capita, future economic growth. It is also an excellent predictor of socioeconomic development.
In societies created by individuals with high IQs, everyone benefits. This is why immigrants who move from low-income, low-productivity countries to wealthy, Western countries see gains in their wages (Hendricks & Schoellman, 2017). This wage gain at migration represents the economic benefit migrants get from moving to a high-IQ society, which is able to make better use of their human capital.
Insofar as low-skilled immigrants lower the national IQ of the host society, they generate negative externalities for natives. Any indirect benefits they may provide is offset by these negative externalities. If moving to a high-IQ country raises one’s living standards independently of one’s own ability, the reverse should also be true — that the same person living in a country with a lower IQ should have lower living standards.
With that in mind, immigration lowers national IQ in every Western country except Australia.
Simple version:
Watch what people do. If immigration were broadly beneficial to natives, we would expect them to move toward it — to follow the opportunity it allegedly creates. If it is harmful, we would expect the opposite. And what we observe is not subtle.
Revealed preference indicates that Westerners dislike actually-existing immigration so much that they are willing to pay a heavy price to escape it.
In immigration-heavy countries, people move away from economic opportunity. They leave the very places where their skills would be most valuable and their incomes highest. That is not how a healthy system behaves. It is how a system behaves when something has gone wrong at a more fundamental level. … People do not walk away from opportunity without a reason, and certainly not on this scale.
But remember, in left-speak the “oppressive” groups are the ones with higher average IQs. Which explains an awful lot about how lefties see the world.
Russia is not as mighty as its propaganda wants you to believe.
Russia’s exports are lower than Poland’s, and many Russians still don’t even have access to decent sanitation.
No wonder they are in year five of the three-day Special Military Operation.
Russia is also now losing its war. Russia is still making some territorial gains, but the Ukrainian rate of gain of territory has been higher this year. Ukrainian drones are on top, in both sophistication and numbers, and the Ukrainians have begun launching machine-only assaults — no men in front. Russian casualties to date are more than twice Ukraine’s, and are at their highest rate in the war (approaching 2,000 men per day). The Ukrainians are hitting oil and military targets up to 1,000 km from their border with regularity and in significant numbers, and the Russian transport system (air, rail) is collapsing under economic sanctions and the lack of access to spare parts. The annual May Day parade in Moscow has been scaled way down, and there is even talk that Putin is afraid.
Russia’s GDP is only slightly larger than Australia’s (US$1.9T).
If the voice referendum is defeated, Professor Marcia Langton said back in April 2023, that’ll be the end of welcomes to country.
It was meant as a threat, but many Australians took it as a promise: vote down the proposal to give Aboriginal people a special say over how we’re all governed, and that will end all the separatist practices that have grown up over time. Like race-based treaties, flying three flags rather than just one national flag, and welcoming people to lands that supposedly belong to some of us more than to all of us.
But when the voice was duly defeated, because most Australians hated the idea that race would be enshrined in our Constitution, instead of listening and learning, the activist class and the green-left establishment redoubled their efforts to achieve by bureaucratic stealth what they’d failed to achieve at the ballot box.
That’s why people are angry and why substantial numbers have now started to audibly reject welcomes to country, most notably at the official Anzac Day dawn service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance for two years running. Not because they’re anti-Aboriginal or innately disrespectful but because they don’t want to be reminded of division on what should be a day of unity.
And many more, who would never stoop to interrupt something sacred, as I said in a post that has now been watched over 200,000 times, are “booing on the inside”.
Especially when the “welcome” is anything but.
After all, who would welcome anyone to their home or an event with a lengthy rant designed not to include but exclude? … The problem, when Aboriginal people welcome us to “their” country, is the inference that everyone else is no more than a guest. Maybe that’s OK if the event is at a remote community or a facility catering especially for Aboriginal people. But on Anzac Day, any suggestion that people who’ve served our country in uniform might be here only on sufferance borders on the sacrilegious.
Yeah!
The day after delivering the Sydney dawn service welcome, Ray Minniecon said: “If I came into your home, I’d expect you to acknowledge that this is your home, this is your house … and … we’re there to, to show the deepest respect to the host … You’re on our country, you’re in our land, just acknowledge it and respect … whose land you’re on … It’s not that difficult to understand for me.”
I’m sorry, Ray, it is for me. Because your land is my land too and your country is my country just as much as it’s yours. After all, Credlins have been here for 172 years, worked hard to build this nation and have sent four generations to war to defend it, so being Australian is all we know. I suspect that millions of Australians felt that way over the Anzac weekend and the conga line of politicians denouncing anyone who booed as “disgraceful” or even “un-Australian” would have just reinforced popular resentment towards the political class.
At about 900 per cent over budget and seven years late, Snowy 2.0 is three to five times costlier than alternative sources of capacity – gas, battery storage and smaller pumped-hydro projects – according to Rystad data. This rises to five to seven times costlier once additional costs are factored in on a like-for-like basis. …
A $2 billion project became $40 billion. Was any due diligence done? About as much as was done on the carbon dioxide theory of global warming that motivated it.
It is now questionable whether Snowy 2.0 should even be finished. Even if one optimistically assumes Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is correct that the project is more than two-thirds complete, and ignoring sunk costs, the remaining expenditure may still prove uncompetitive with alternative capacity options. The fact there can be serious debate over the merits of completing a project that is already largely built reveals the scale of the disaster.
The bigger damage to the public has not come from the cost blowouts borne by taxpayers. The 2018 announcement of Snowy 2.0 deterred private investment in new capacity. Investors feared competing with a government-funded project that would flood the market from 2021. When that capacity failed to materialise on schedule — and still won’t for several more years — the market was left short.
This has driven higher prices, inefficient secret deals by NSW and Victoria to prop up coal-fired generation, and worsening reliability. Market experts warned of exactly this outcome at the time. Government didn’t want to listen. …
Ideological project:
How did we end up here? … Snowy 2.0 offered a Holy Grail: a new low-emissions project capable of winning bipartisan backing from Labor and within the Coalition under Malcolm Turnbull.
The government refused to let details such as cost, schedule and design risks derail a powerful (and overdue) political narrative on taking action on energy. …
When Labor took power in 2022, did Bowen make sure to get the project back on track? Of course not. Instead he focused on increasing the cost of Snowy’s other project, the Kurri Kurri gas-fired power station, by demanding it be capable of burning green hydrogen — another foolish politicised prerogative.
One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce is scathing about the entire project. Which is relevant, given he was a member of the government that approved it.
‘Like the whole climate cult swindle, it turned into a complete financial disaster,’ laments Mr Joyce. ‘A cost well in excess of $40bn and in excess of a 12-year build for three days of 2000 megawatts of power. Every coal-fired power plant in Australia could have been upgraded for less than the money that was pissed up the wall on Turnbull’s power station in the scrub.’
And Mr Joyce makes this pertinent point:
‘If a public company hid this loss from the accounts at the AGM of the company, there would be possible jail time coming the way of the board members,’ Mr Joyce says.
