Scientists demands answers as audit uncovers widespread errors in Bureau of Meteorology raw climate records. By Marcus de Blonk Smith and Elizabeth Pike in The Australian.

The Australian newspaper, perhaps sensing blood, is campaigning. I am being quoted.

Scientists have called for “secret climate business” at the Bureau of Meterology to end , as Labor dismisses calls to act on the widespread errors and false readings revealed in a forensic audit of the agency’s raw data.

Led by investigator Tom Berger and retired scientist Geoff Sherrington, the audit — using sophisticated technology — uncovered false readings and widespread errors in the BOM’s raw climate data, including blocks of temperature readings copied and pasted across different years and seasons. …

A fact check by The Australian at the National Archives confirmed the double-up did not exist in the handwritten records and the 1867 data was wrong online.

“Scientists say”:

Scientists on Sunday were calling for more independent rigour over the BOM’s raw climate data.

David Evans, who built Australia’s carbon accounting software in the land-use sector, said the agency’s current “trust me” approach was not good enough.

He called for the bureau’s climate data to be regularly audited, like any other public company.

“I would have little confidence in a public company whose accounts are not audited. I would not invest in such a company,” Dr Evans said, adding that publicly traded companies on the Australian Stock Exchange were required to have their accounts audited every six months.

Drawing the comparison between the BOM’s climate data and the “bad old days” of drug trials, when researchers and companies were under “tremendous” pressure to exaggerate the benefits of a drug, he said the solution were audits that replicate the final climate datasets from raw data.

“Secret climate business is no longer adequate on a matter as important as temperature trends, yet this has been the norm,” Dr Evans said.

“The examples in the financial and medical arenas should be followed, and a regime of full disclosure implemented. Without full disclosure, confidence in climate matters will remain low, and dissatisfaction – disbelief, even – will remain widespread.”

He said the move to audit the bureau’s climate data should be welcomed by climate scientists, in the same way a responsible public company welcomes regular auditing of its finances, or a medical researcher “making his processing methods and software public”.

“If the climate scientists’ methods and conclusions are basically sound, this will be revealed by the audits. This is not a reflection on either the character or expertise of climate scientists, but I am not going to just take their work for it.”

Scientist Jennifer Marohasy, who has had a decades-long interest in BOM’s temperature adjustments, echoed Dr Evans’ calls for an audit of the agency’s weather stations. With the exception of Adelaide, she said there had been no proper audit of any weather station in Australia.

“If there had been, (weather stations such as) Sydney Observatory would have been audited, and it wouldn’t have been left to Tom Berger to uncover the copied months, the August 1867 overwritten by August 1907,” she said, referring to the forensic audit. …

Laughing stock:

Opposition environment spokesman Andrew Bragg called on Environment Minister Murray Watt to explain what was “going on inside his agencies”.

“The BOM is becoming a laughing stock under this government,” Senator Bragg said on Sunday, referring to the agency’s costly website upgrade debacle.

‘Trust me’ approach must end: climate scientists should release raw data to restore public trust. By Dr David Evans in The Australian.

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. — Lord Acton

 

Sydney Observatory. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

 

Let’s apply the lessons of other fields to climate science.

I would have little confidence in a public company whose accounts are not audited. I would not invest in such a company. Of course, I could not invest in such a company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, because it is a condition of listing that a company has its accounts audited by an outside auditor every six months.

Thirty years ago, I would have had little confidence in the benefits claimed for a drug in a medical journal. The pressure on researchers and companies to exaggerate was tremendous. Auditing of the processing of results from drug trials was not possible because that information was not disclosed. Since then, the medical industry has reformed. It is now standard practice to make publicly available the raw data from the drug trials, the methods used to process that data, and the software used to process that data. Interested parties can now replicate the results from the raw data. Government approval for a drug now requires this. Confidence was mostly restored.

I have little confidence in some climate datasets because:

1. There are many after-the-fact adjustments, often multiple times, often decades later.
2. The reasons for the adjustments are effectively secret, described only in vague terms.
3. The datasets are not audited.
4. The raw data and the pathways to the final datasets are not made public with complete documentation and software.
5. There is a consistent tendency for revised datasets to better fit the carbon dioxide theory of global warming.

By sheer coincidence, the previous version of the data was nearly always wrong, and after each revision it agrees more with the theory. What are the odds? Genuine technical errors would move the data away from the theory as often as they moved towards it.

Replicability is at the heart of science. The final dataset must be replicable from the raw data. This means someone else can start with a copy of the raw data, run the processing software (from source code), and produce the same final dataset. If human judgment enters the process, then it too needs to be documented sufficiently so that it can be replicated.

To further improve credibility, the raw data should be posted on a publicly accessible website immediately it is collected from the field.

Climate data is like drug-trial data back in the bad old days. The current “trust me” approach is not good enough. Too often the trend in the final version of a dataset differs substantially from the trend in the raw data. There might be good reasons for this, or there might not, but no one, apart from a few insiders, knows because the data processing is kept secret.

The process of science is simple: do not trust anything unless it can be replicated. The motto of the Royal Society is relevant: “nullius in verba” or “take nobody’s word for it”.

Reputations, motives, money, popularity, political status — they are all irrelevant. What distinguishes science from other fields of knowledge acquisition is that observations and replication are the ultimate authorities on what is accepted as true.

Secret climate business is no longer adequate on a matter as important as temperature trends, yet this has been the norm. Examples in the financial and medical arenas should be followed, and a regime of full disclosure implemented. Without full disclosure, confidence in climate matters will remain low and dissatisfaction — disbelief even — will remain widespread.

The solution is audits that can replicate the final climate datasets from the raw data. This is a narrow technical exercise. Climate scientists should welcome it, just as a responsible public company welcomes an audit of its finances, or an honest medical researcher welcomes making his processing methods and software public.

If the climate scientists’ methods and conclusions are basically sound, this will be revealed by the audits.

This is not a reflection on either the character or expertise of climate scientists, but I am not going to just take their word for it.

This follows up on revelations in The Australian that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) admits errors after a audit revealed duplicated historical temperature data. Joanne has been pointing out glaring errors and inconsistencies in the BOM data as far back as 2014: see her post two days ago BOM’s Scientific Scandal: the Raw Data is Not Raw.

Nice to get an article into the newspapers again; it’s been a while. The zeitgeist is changing.

Flying cars reveal a cultural divide. By Glenn Reynolds.

 

“A flying car is what men do when they are free. A wealth tax is what politicians do to the men who built it. One of them needs the other to survive, and it isn’t Musk.”

Well said. As Elon Musk has noted, our society is divided into Makers and Takers. Elon is our preeminent Maker. The Takers don’t like it when he does things. There’s more to that than trying to steal his money, though God knows stealing is a major part of being a Taker. But there’s also jealousy.

Elon’s flying car — the Tesla Roadster Rocket — is amazing. … The upside down driving, and that ultra-precise flip, are in some ways more impressive than the rockets. (This demonstration was fully autonomous, with no human on board. Quoth Elon: “Well, it is technically autonomous for this demo to make sure we don’t kill anyone!”). …

With rocket assistance, it can do zero to sixty in .81 seconds, a truly absurd acceleration. With the suction fans holding it down it can corner in ways that appear to defy the laws of physics.

But it’s the flying that catches everyone’s attention. Musk said he decided to build it when Peter Thiel complained that here we were, well into the 21st Century, without flying cars. It can only fly for a few seconds (Grok tells me a max of 7-11 seconds in level flight, best-case.) It’s roughly as capable, flying-wise, as the Wright Brothers’ first plane. It’s not a Jetsons flying car that will take a family on a vacation to the Moon. But hey, The Jetsons was set in 2062. …

I stand by this take. I also like this response:

 

 

A problem with our left:

The thing about the left is, it’s made up largely of people who aren’t great at doing things. They don’t get rich by building things or doing things. They get rich, when they do, by declaring problems, getting the government to throw money at them, and then stealing some (sometimes pretty much all) of that money for themselves and their NGOs. There’s nothing for them in flying cars.

But there’s more than that going on here. Because getting rich to them is secondary to self-importance. When Elon does something cool, they’re offended because they feel diminished by that.

As Norman Mailer wrote about why the hippies turned against the space program, the hippies spent years going around talking about how they were going to change the world, then a bunch of guys with flattop haircuts and pocket protectors and slide rules went and actually did it. Unforgivable.

Interestingly, people on the right — and most Americans generally — don’t feel diminished by other people doing cool stuff. They feel spiritually and culturally enriched by it. …

If it was up to the left, Elon would be in jail and his money would be fed to corrupt NGOs.

Larry Correia:

All the comments from terminally online liberals are crying about Elon’s politics. All they can do is focus on one dude disagreeing with them. They can’t get past it. All they can do is minimize. They have no imagination. No excitement. It’s just so sad. They’re so SMALL.

So the conversations are like —
“Wow, they just did some Matchbox stuff with an actual car.”
“That’s nothing. You’re stupid. Elon supports Germany’s AfD party. I am offended. You should have more critical thinking like me.”

And sadly that’s a paraphrase not an exaggeration.

Democrats today are all like “So what Elon made car that does flying kick flips? That’s lame and dumb! When it goes upside down my drink will fall out of the cup holder! Did you even think of that stupid MAGA idiots!?!”

What did AOC ever build?

🚨 AOC gets roasted in a brutal new meme as Tesla’s flying Roadster soars right past her. The internet showed no mercy on this one. Somewhere, the Green New Deal just got lapped. https://t.co/qE5bkNFKrW

— Next News Network (@nextnews) October 16, 2026

Two ways of life:

 

Finally, imagine:

🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/0tUPlCf4ZF

— Brivael Le Pogam (@brivael) October 16, 2026

Ok, the laws of physics take a beating in some parts of that video, but it’s fun.

UPDATE: Coming soon:

 

@GuntherEagleman But did you see this?

https://t.co/8aGl6Coocd

— Sonja hernandez (@Sdelong19) October 17, 2026

 

Never forget: Democrats were throwing Molotov cocktails at Teslas because Elon Musk wanted to DOGE government fraud. https://t.co/nsM4lOKPbF

— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) October 16, 2026

A confession from Japan and a call to arms. By Nobunaga.

Americans — a confession from Japan you were never meant to hear.

We are terrified of fascism. Not the version in your textbooks. The version that lives inside us.

In 1941, no dictator dragged the Japanese people into the dark. We dragged each other. Neighbor watched neighbor. Mothers reported their own sons. One doubtful word at the fish market and the police came in the night. The village went silent. That silence lasted four years and killed millions.

That is how a free nation dies. Not with jackboots. With whispers.

And right now — the same silence is being built again in Japan. Not by the right. By the Left.

They throw our gates open. Strangers pour in by the millions — Muslims, Africans, people who will never bow to our dead. And when a Japanese grandmother dares to say, “wait — slow down — let us think,” she is dragged into the public square and branded a fascist. A racist. A monster.

Hear me clearly: in our country, “racist” is no longer a moral word. It is a muzzle. A weapon. A silencer pressed to the mouth of every citizen who still loves Japan.

If we fall, Beijing feasts. Moscow carves the atlas. The lights of the free world blink out — Tokyo first. Seoul next. Washington within a generation.

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

So I come to you — Americans. The one nation on earth that still salutes its own flag without flinching. …

From one wandering samurai in Tokyo, to every patriot across your fifty states —
You are not alone.
You are the wall.
Stand.

Legal corruption: Book deals. By Robert Malone.

For prominent political figures, multimillion-dollar book contracts are not particularly unusual. …

Imagine receiving a $4 million advance for two books that have not yet been published, with the understanding that you will not write, edit, or promote them while holding public office for many years to come. Now imagine that the publisher paying you those millions is owned by a close political associate, who also operates political organizations that support you by and your political career by raising money from wealthy donors and corporations. …

The mechanism involves advance book purchases by political campaigns, Super PACs, nonprofit organizations, and other politically connected institutions. These organizations can purchase thousands of copies of an influential person’s book before publication, creating a substantial pool of guaranteed revenue for the publisher. Publishers can then factor these advance purchases into their financial projections, providing the financial backing for unusually large advances to politicians, former officeholders, NGO leaders, and other politically influential individuals.

Money originating from political donors and affiliated organizations can thus flow through the publishing industry and emerge as personal income for the author, under the perfectly respectable designation of a book advance. It is a form of legalized money laundering. …

Publishing agreements are private. Advance amounts are often confidential. Institutional purchases may be routed through wholesalers and distributors. …

Not at all like regular publishing deals:

The difference between political publishing and ordinary publishing is staggering.

In conventional publishing, an advance is money paid to an author against royalties the publisher hopes the book will eventually earn. Many authors receive only a few thousand dollars. Many receive no advance whatsoever. … Increasingly, authors also encounter publishing arrangements in which they must contribute money toward production, marketing, or distribution themselves. …

Against that backdrop, a $2 million advance for a single book represents an extraordinary commitment. ..

On a hardcover selling for $20, an author might receive just $2 per copy, depending on the royalty agreement. At those rates, a $4 million book advance would require sales of approximately 1.3 million to 2 million copies, representing $40 million in retail book sales, merely for the publisher to earn back the advance. …

Maybe the Clintons? (Surprised?)

Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, reportedly carried an advance of approximately $14 million, although Simon & Schuster never publicly confirmed the amount. Bill Clinton received a reported $10 million to $12 million advance for his 2004 memoir, My Life. Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation has accumulated substantial financial resources, reporting approximately $305 million in net assets in its latest available nonprofit financial data.

These are separate financial arrangements, and there is no established evidence that foundation funds financed the Clintons’ book advances.

Maybe a Trump supporter paid RFK Jr to quit the presidential race in 2024 and join MAHA onto MAGA?

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. … received $4 million in book advances, $2 million each for Unsettled Science and A Defense for Israel. These were not royalties earned from books already purchased by readers. They were advances against anticipated future sales, paid by a relatively small independent publisher whose owner is also a longtime Kennedy political ally.

Skyhorse is not Penguin Random House. Its business model has historically emphasized modest advances, frequently under $10,000, with many authors receiving nothing upfront. Against that background, two $2 million advances represent an extraordinary financial commitment. …

The sequence is remarkable.

• July 13–15, 2024: Kennedy and Trump discussed Kennedy’s political future, including a possible role in a Trump administration and Kennedy’s withdrawal from the presidential race.
• August 1, 2024: Seventeen days after their July 15 meeting, Kennedy’s multimillion-dollar publishing agreement with Skyhorse commenced.
• August 23, 2024: Just 22 days after the Skyhorse agreement began, Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.
• 2025–2026: Kennedy joined the Trump administration as HHS Secretary and received the full $4 million in book advances from a publisher owned by one of his closest political allies.

Was the publishing arrangement connected to Kennedy’s decision to leave the race and endorse Trump? Was it, in whole or in part, a political payoff? Or was this all merely coincidence? And the $4 million advance had nothing to do with Kennedy dropping out of the race? …

Kennedy’s case brings these concerns together in one extraordinary sequence: a $4 million publishing agreement commencing 22 days before he left the presidential race and endorsed Trump, a publisher deeply involved in his political network, substantial additional financial relationships involving his household, payments received while serving as HHS Secretary, and an ethics agreement restricting his work on the books. None of those facts alone establishes an illegal payoff. …

Oh dear, MAHA not effective:

On October 8, 2026, former Kennedy campaign adviser Tiffany Cianci released the MAHA Movement Scorecard, examining 42 commitments involving food, farming, pesticides, toxic chemicals, regulatory capture, and related health policies. The scorecard’s authors classified 37 commitments as broken and five as partially fulfilled, with none fully met.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific

Most corrupt people didn’t start out corrupt. By Brivael Le Pogam.

Take someone honest. Kind. Someone who genuinely wants to do good. They join an NGO, a government agency, a big corporation, a political party.

The first few months are fine. Then they notice the first small thing that’s off. A number massaged for the annual report. A program that doesn’t work but gets renewed because the budget depends on it. A colleague who lies in a meeting, and nobody calls it out.

They say nothing. It’s not that big a deal. They’re new. They’ll pick their battles.

They move up. At every level, the compromise gets a little bigger. And at every level, what they stand to lose gets a little heavier.

Status. Salary. A 30-year mortgage. A whole social circle built inside that world. A reputation. An identity.

And one day, they face the real choice. There are only three options.

1. Tell the truth, and destroy their career.
2. Leave quietly, and rebuild everything from zero.
3. Or look away, cover it up, and keep going.

Guess what the vast majority choose. Not because they’re bad people. Because the system made virtue ruinous and compromise comfortable.

It works like a virus. It doesn’t kill you all at once. It colonizes you slowly, one justification at a time. “Everyone does it.” “If I leave, someone worse will take my place.” “I’ll change things from the inside.”

Ten years later, the sincere person who walked in is gone. And the worst part is they never even noticed. …

Manufacturing hypocrisy, as well as consent:

For decades, the left captured the institutions that hand out prestige: universities, media, NGOs, the bureaucracy. And it built a system that rewards saying the right things, not producing the right results. Where intentions matter more than impact. Where a failing program never gets cut, it gets refunded.

A system like that mechanically manufactures hypocrites. Even out of sincere people.

And it spills over everywhere. In business, politics, culture, we’ve taught an entire generation that to succeed, you have to be an asshole. Lie, manipulate, play the game. Not because that’s human nature. Because that’s what the rules reward.

Incentives drive outcomes:

The good news: if incentives can create corruption, they can create virtue too.

Pay NGOs for the number of people they get off the street, not the number they manage. Make lying cost more than telling the truth. Make sure the cheater gets crushed and the whistleblower gets protected.

We’re at a turning point. And for every law, every policy, every organization, every company we build, there’s only one question that matters:

Are the incentives we’re creating pushing people to do good, or to do harm?

Right now, the answer is obvious. Time to change it.

There’s also the problem that the gates to political power often do not open for you unless the right people have compromat on you. You have to have done something wrong, and they know about it and could publicize it, or they won’t let you near the top. Hence, the people who get near the top of western politics are too often rotten people, controlled by others. The honest straight shooters rarely get admitted nowadays.

Tesla’s New Roadster Takes Flight. By Christopher Otts at the WSJ.

After nine years, potentially millions of dollars in deposits and considerable hype, the Tesla Roadster is finally ready to launch—which it did.

The electric automaker on Thursday unveiled its second-generation sports car with a flourish of engineering prowess. Using SpaceX rocket technology, the angular sports car climbed a curved ramp and hurled itself to a controlled landing. Later, it leapt over five other Tesla vehicles while twisting in the air.

Three short clips:

 

The demonstration was held before a crowd of Tesla enthusiasts — some of whom paid $250,000 to reserve the car nine years ago — at a SpaceX rocket test site facility in McGregor, Texas. ….

The Roadster uses “a fan suction system” underneath to increase grip and downforce. Not long after that, the Roadster jumped through the air — as Musk long promised — using a pair of compressed-air thrusters.

Cost? No answer yet. Street legal? Depends which streets. Full self flying? No idea. Government involvement? As little as possible.

Turns out the future does have flying cars.

Widespread despair among the young over AI: Just get to press Enter, instead of getting the chance to use their brains. By Gregory Conti.

Received a moving message from an aspiring mid-20s professional that, I think, captures an increasingly widespread despair among younger cohorts:

“It really saddens me when I hear about the work [senior people in the field] are doing. Their work seems interesting, and I’ll never get to do it.

The people in their fifties and sixties, they’re lucky. I’m even lucky. I feel bad for the kids who are fourteen. I at least got a chance to use my brain for one or two minutes, and that’s still priceless. I got to be human. I got to be more than just some puppet who presses Enter so something can think for me.

It’s very depressing looking at people who are sixty, who I would love to be in twenty years. But to know that I won’t get to do that because Dario said so, right? And, like, that’s actually heartbreaking.

It’s heartbreaking to know that no matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, you cannot add value as a human being in a year or two’s time.

It’s like hitting a brick wall. You feel no motivation to build the skill, to get better, to attain wisdom and knowledge. It seems worthless to you. And all the older people are telling you all your efforts might be worthless, and they don’t need you anymore. And they can just sit there and, you know, make money and leave you to drown.”

Looking on the Bright Side. By Kris Cvetko:

The value of a human being is so much greater than the ability to fill out Excel sheets, sit through Teams calls, and waste their potential in a corporate job.

I hear the concern loud and clear. People are afraid of losing their source of income. And understandably so, especially when that income depends on activities that have become mind-numbing corporate routines.

Should AI replace those activities? Absolutely. And rightfully so. …

AI is a mirror. And the fact that some work can be replaced by a statistical token prediction model says a lot more about the nature of that work than about the humans doing it. …

What might happen (if Allah wishes):

I’m talking about an economy where more of us become entrepreneurs, creators, and builders. Where individuals have access to capabilities and means of production that were completely out of reach for most of us just five years ago.

Our kids hate AI.

But we cannot put the genie back in the bottle — there are too many bottles and too many genies, i.e. someone else will use AI if we don’t.

Too late, we’re here! By Mr Lee Jasper in the UK.

Wave your flags. March up and down. Shout till you’re red, white and blue in the face.

Britain’s getting Blacker, browner and more mixed with every generation.

You ain’t turning that clock back. The future’s already being born. Grow the fuck up and deal with it.

 

(Will the “we’re here, we’re queer” crowd be forced into hiding?)

 

Will there be any ethnically or culturally white countries left in 50 years time? Will they just disappear under a demographic tide? Victors write history, so it will be seen as a good thing, an end to the evil of whiteness.

(Bonus observation: Is there any hateful thing you can say that doesn’t sound ok in today’s media if you say it about whites or white men?)

Additional 26,500 Afghan migrants under Albanese — but Morrison made the commitment. Ryan Dally canes Labor for importing incompatible migrants:

The Albanese Government has quietly approved an additional 26,500 Afghan migrants, family reunions and welfare support.

A spokesman said priority is given to “persecuted minorities, women, children, and LGBTQI+ individuals”

What changes when they land here? They still live the same lifestyle and then try to push it onto us.

Albanese? No, it was the uniparty. Brave AI:

The 26,500 Afghan places are real, but they are a Coalition-era pledge that the Albanese government carried forward, not a new Albanese approval.

In August 2021, the Morrison government first committed to 3,000 humanitarian places for Afghans, then expanded it in January and March 2022 to 26,500 humanitarian + 5,000 family visas over five years (2021-22 to 2025-26), including a 16,500-place special intake from July 2022.

The Albanese Government (in office from May 2022) inherited and continued that pre-existing commitment — it did not “quietly approve” it.

The Albanese government’s own distinct refugee-policy moves were raising the general humanitarian program to 20,000 places in 2023, and in August 2026 intervening to block Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s plan to cut it back to 13,750.

Craig Kelly points out that first the Labor Party, then later the Islamic Party, will benefit politically:

26,500 of which 95% will be voting Labor (or the Islamic Party preferencing Labor) in 4 years time.

Albanese’s migration policy is firstly a vote harvesting exercise for the Labor Party.

Ah, the wily ways of the bureaucracy and the uniparty.

France is reaching the end of the social democratic road. By Brivael Le Pogam.

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.

I come from your future.

The promise:

In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. …

The promise was protection. …

The result:

Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.

The result is stagnation.

One more promise, one more regulation, one more bureaucrat:

The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.

 

Author’s illustration

 

Trust me. You don’t want to be France. …

Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.

What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation. …

The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you’re being offered is more of the same.

That’s the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears.

The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.

In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can’t afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.

Ask for less state, not more.

How it keeps happening, every time:

Forget ideology. Follow the incentives.

A politician’s horizon is the next election. Two years, four years, six at most. His reward comes from promising: free tuition, cancelled debt, guaranteed housing, a green transition paid for by someone else. The bill arrives in ten, twenty, thirty years. By then he’s retired, writing his memoir, giving paid speeches. He collects the applause today. You pay the invoice tomorrow. Any system where the person who makes the promise never pays for breaking it will produce endless broken promises. That isn’t a moral failure. It’s a mathematical certainty.

A bureaucrat is rewarded for the size of his budget and his team, not for solving the problem. If he solves it, his department shrinks. If it gets worse, he asks for more money, and he usually gets it. Failure is literally funded. …

When capital is allocated by politics instead of markets, the most profitable skill is no longer building. It’s lobbying. Getting close to the money. Writing the rule that crushes your competitor. Corruption stops being a bug and becomes the business model. …

The incentives of the left, which is now primarily the bureaucratic-welfare class:

Meanwhile, Europe’s fashionable economists offer the opposite diagnosis. Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman tell us the problem is that the state doesn’t take enough: more wealth taxes, more redistribution, more state. France has been running that experiment for fifty years. The result is one of the highest tax burdens in the developed world, record debt, and capital and talent leaving the country every year.

The same old ending:

History shows how this movie ends. Debt piles up until it can no longer be repaid. Currencies get debased. Then comes the reset, and it is rarely peaceful. Rome debased its coins for generations before it collapsed. Weimar’s hyperinflation came just before the darkest chapter of the 20th century. Empires that can’t stop spending don’t reform gently. They break.

We are approaching the end of that cycle. America now spends more on interest on its debt than on its military.

The US is one of the least affected. Check out China:

 

China is in a debt black hole from which there is no escape.

 

A country that borrows heavily from the future and cannot possibly pay it back, or keep its citizens at the standard of living afforded by the credit card, sometimes resorts to war — for example Nazi Germany 1939.

hat-tip David Archibald

Has Sweden Passed the Point of NO RETURN? By Iben Thranholm in First Things.

For decades, Sweden had perhaps the most open immigration policy and the strongest commitment to tolerance and multiculturalism in the West. That changed in 2015, when the Sweden Democrats (SD), once treated as political pariahs, pulled Sweden’s major parties — including the Social Democrats and the Moderates — toward a far more restrictive immigration policy. What was once radical became mainstream. [That is, SD started pulling too many votes from the established parties who caused the problem.]

For a decade, almost everything went SD’s way. The party pressed its advantage and demanded stricter assimilation, calling for an end to multiculturalism, a ban on wearing the hijab in public, and a new emphasis on remigration. … Permanent residence permits for asylum-related stays were abolished. Citizenship became harder to obtain. The government began to offer financial incentives to immigrants who voluntarily return to their countries of origin. Many Swedes agreed that the country needed to slam on the brakes after years of almost unchecked immigration.

But it appears that that course correction may have come too late. By the end of 2025, 2.94 million of Sweden’s nearly 11 million inhabitants were foreign-born or born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents.

The foreigners vote, and gave the left the winning margin in recent elections:

In the September 13 election, … the right-wing government lost its majority … In 786 electoral districts where at least half the population was foreign-born or had two foreign-born parents, the center-left gained some 73,000 votes compared with 2022. That shift alone exceeded the roughly 50,000-vote margin between the two blocs nationwide. …

SD’s own party secretary, Mattias Bäckström Johansson, acknowledged after the election that the proposed hijab ban and the push for remigration may have mobilized immigrant voters. …

Mosques in several Swedish cities began teaching democracy in the run-up to the election. Uppsala’s mosque held a “voting school.” Gothenburg’s deployed election ambassadors and published its own voting guide, with sections on the hijab and religious schools. The Islamic Association in Malmö worked to raise turnout in Rosengård.

In one sense, this was exactly what integration experts had dreamed of for years. But many of these voters are not secular liberals who merely happen to be Muslim. They vote as Muslims, seeking to protect their Islamic way of life.

What do Muslims want? This is a democracy after all…

For Sweden, this marks a new phase. The question is no longer how to stop immigration, but what these Muslim voters want.

Other countries offer a hint. A 2015 Danish survey found that 40 percent of Muslims believed Danish law should at least partly be based on the Qur’an, while a British survey found that 23 percent of its participants supported Shari’a law in parts of Britain. ….

This year, the Social Democrats and the Left Party … began producing campaign material in Arabic….

Parties may soon discover that votes can be won by accommodating religious demands over schools, dress, and family life — precisely where traditional Islam collides with secular Swedish norms. No Islamist party is needed. Existing parties simply want to win elections. …

Coming soon to a country you happen to be living in?

Sweden’s election may be the canary in the coal mine. What happened there can happen in any Western democracy with a large immigrant electorate. The secular liberal democracy many thought untouchable may become a peaceful route to power for a faith that shows little interest in retreating into the private sphere, as proponents of multiculturalism would have hoped.

So predictable, so predicted. Replacement theory in action.

Hope those Swedish lefties enjoyed their moment on priding themselves of building the world’s “humanitarian superpower” (that’s what the called themselves). Look at Egypt — still a few white Christians left.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Incandescent bulbs are back because LEDs cause health problems. By Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards at The Highwire.

Throughout history, humans have lived under two lights. Sun and fire.

The incandescent bulb arrived in the 1800s … Then, about fifteen years ago, we traded that warm light for something our biology had yet to experience: the LED. As is the case with many novelties, no one checked into what it might do to us.

The swap from incandescent to LED bulbs became mandatory, thanks to a 2007 energy bill signed by George W. Bush. … LEDs use about 75% less electricity than incandescent, they last for years, and old bulbs waste most of their energy as heat. Without much thought, the switch looked like pure progress to many.

But then a funny thing happened:

Last month, when the Department of Energy testified to Congress in support of bringing back incandescent bulbs, it caught the attention of those of us against LED….

Light is not just something that we see. Light is biological information, and every cell in our body evolved under the sun and the fire, both of which pour out a full, continuous spectrum that is heavy in warm reds and invisible near-infrared light. The incandescent bulb, for all of its efficiency, is itself a small, tamed fire. They called that waste. But the “wasted” heat that regulators scolded for its infrared radiation is the same frequency that has bathed our bodies for centuries.

Because:

LED light is altogether different, making light through a narrow electronic process that spikes strong in the blue part of the light spectrum, and emits almost no infrared at all. Even worse, it flickers rapidly, switching on and off hundreds of times per second. The flicker is too fast to register with our conscious eye, but it is not too fast to wreak havoc on our nervous system. …

Blue-heavy light from typical LEDs lowers the membrane potential in our mitochondria, thus impacting the electrical charge that lets our mitochondria produce ATP, the energy currency of the cell. Along with that, blue light in the evening suppresses melatonin and disrupts circadian rhythms, which in turn affects sleep, hormone balance, and overnight cellular repair. And studies on animals reveal that blue light causes retinal damage. Eye damage is significant because half of the human brain is wired, either directly or indirectly, to process what it receives through the eyes. Stare too long at a device and, yes, your eyes are wrecked. …

Dr. Jack Kruse … insists that our mitochondria respond directly to the light that hits our skin and eyes, and that the red and near-infrared wavelengths they need are exactly those emitted by incandescent light. The LED light does not have this. … Now, our bodies are starved of them all day under blue-heavy light, leading to exhaustion, shallow sleep, and a dry, dead feeling behind the eyes, with no explanation for where it came from.

Couldn’t be bothered with a full-on science video today. This is breathtakingly short:

ChatGPT:

There is credible evidence for specific applications, including some forms of wound healing, oral mucositis associated with cancer therapy, certain pain and inflammatory conditions, hair growth and aspects of skin treatment. However, study methods and doses vary greatly, and results are not uniformly convincing.

Evidence for broad claims such as extending lifespan, treating systemic mitochondrial dysfunction, preventing dementia or substantially improving general health is not established. Brain photobiomodulation, including 810–1070 nm devices, is biologically plausible and has encouraging early studies, but human trials remain relatively small and exploratory. Animal Alzheimer’s research is considerably stronger than the human evidence.”

I switched to incandescents in my office a couple of months ago. Turns out you can still buy them at Bunnings, as specialty spotlight bulbs (Osram Concentra Spot R63).

Regulators versus Builders. By Wessie du Toit at UnHerd.

Businessman James Dyson, famed for his bagless vacuum cleaners, … has long argued that Britain’s problems are tied to the character of its elites, who esteem knowledge work and cultural literacy above the hands-on business of technology, invention, entrepreneurship and trade.

In 2004, he even stormed out of his post as chairman of London’s Design Museum, complaining that it had become a “style showcase” chasing visitor numbers with frivolous exhibitions about flower-arranging and designer shoes, rather than a place to promote serious engineering.

In many Western countries, there is now a prominent dividing line between, broadly, managerial cultures and entrepreneurial ones.

• The former are those employees in institutional settings — corporations, the public sector, NGOs, and what Dyson calls an “Oxford-Westminster bubble” — who value credentials, are fond of rules, and assume that the world is shaped by ideas and narratives.
• By contrast, those of an entrepreneurial persuasion are interested in the material facts of how things actually work, while chafing against rules and prizing innovation and individual ambition.

Consider the coalition that voted for Donald Trump in 2024. It included people who work in traditional industries involving cars, machinery or oil and gas, as well as those who do business outside of corporate structures, such as family-owned enterprises and venture capitalists. These groups were united in their resentment of a professional managerial class, stereotypically inhabiting a world of yoga studios and DEI policies, which stifled them with regulations and liberal mores.

The revolt of Britain’s entrepreneurs indicates that a similar tension has emerged here. Terms of opprobrium such as “lanyard class” and “the Blob” try to capture a middle-class, managerial ethos that now runs through the country’s institutions like a stick of rock. Its priority is not how the economic and material underpinnings of modern life operate, but ensuring that they conform to the appropriate standards mandated by equalities law, environmental regulations and progressive cultural etiquette. …

It is fundamentally a question of attitudes and social environment, and can therefore provide the basis of a much wider division. Less privileged staff at managerial institutions are likely to absorb the dominant assumptions of those settings, while people of widely differing means and backgrounds can identify with a message of self-reliance, ambition and scorn for meddling bureaucrats.

Too many people telling others what to do and taking a cut, too few building and making. No wonder productivity is down everywhere.

Everywhere it seems the issue is parasites versus doers. Our current system has allowed too many parasites too accumulate.