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 They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state.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.

US Military has changed direction: ‘No Beardos, No Weirdos’. By Mike Fredenburg at The Epoch Times.

From Secretary of War Hegseth’s Sept. 30 State of the Force speech:

“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.”

“Do unto your unit as you would have done unto your own child’s unit. Would you want them serving in a unit where standards were lowered to meet quotas? Or a unit where leaders were promoted for reasons other than merit, performance, or war fighting? The answer is not just no. The answer is hell no.” …

He framed last year’s historic speech as a break from “the Defense Department of old” and “liberation day [from the DEI/woke mindset],” stating that the War Department’s mission was “war fighting. Preparing to fight and preparing to win, unrelenting, unapologetic, and uncompromising in that single pursuit.” …

Hegseth said the turnaround is “wildly popular both inside our ranks and with young Americans looking from the outside,” and that retention is at record rates. As an implied rebuke to the exaggerated narrative of how bad things had been aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, he noted the ship had an 84.4 percent reenlistment rate – among the highest of any aircraft carrier despite being at sea for more than 260 days. …

Hegseth noted that when it comes to recruiting, every branch has been setting records since President Donald Trump won in November 2024 … All five active-duty services met or exceeded their fiscal 2025 recruiting goals, the strongest department-wide performance in about 15 years. …

Hegseth attributes the success in recruiting and retention to restored confidence in military leadership rather than bonuses: Americans enlist and stay, he argued, when they are led by “strong patriots, not by weak weirdos,” and when promotion is merit-based. …

Some specifics:

About 10 percent of generals and admirals have been removed, and general-officer billets cut by another 10 percent, for a reduction of about 20 percent.

Standards from around 1990 are back, including gender-neutral combat standards set at the previous male level, a combat field test, two fitness tests a year, height and weight standards, and daily physical training.

Diversity quotas, identity observances, and social-emotional leader evaluations have been dropped in favor of merit-based promotion and a performance test for colonels seeking general rank.

Military sexual assaults and suicides are down, and black and female recruiting are up even without quotas.

Commanders report more authority, capability, and backing than at any point in their careers.

Time for the Liberal Party to Expel Malcolm Turnbull. By Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian.

The rot grew when many in the Liberal Party abandoned cultural convictions. The fact that many Liberals took leadership roles championing the Voice was a betrayal of the most basic tenet for conservatives: that every human being must be treated equally under our founding document, the Constitution.

The Liberal Party was shamed into acting left by the media, led by the ABC:

If you didn’t support the dogma on net zero, you were treated as a philistine. If you didn’t agree with the voice, you were likely labelled a racist. This is how the left treats freedom of speech — agree with it, or it will shame you into silence or submission.

The complete surrender of the Liberal Party on traditional centre-right cultural issues was so abject that some Liberals — even former prime ministers — adopted a deliberate strategy.

Don’t talk about the culture wars, they said. Instead, discussing immigration became racist, expressing gender-critical views was hateful and questioning DEI was straight-out oppression.

The problem for the Liberal Party is its left flank. Can we please stop calling them “moderates”; there is nothing moderate about them. More comfortable shuffling around the left ecosystem of Labor-Green-teals, they cannot avoid responsibility for the cultural and economic carnage under way in this country.

The best measure of the Liberals’ left-wing flank is the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation on the right. Had the Liberal Party remained a broad church where both conservative and small-l liberals shared the pulpit, it would not be in such dire straits today. …

Three steps to rebuild the Liberal Party:

1. Expel Malcolm Turnbull from the Liberal Party. … If Turnbull wants to play martyr, let him. It can’t be any worse than it is right now.He is a central part of the left milieu, beloved by the ABC and every climate change zealot, cheered by Labor every time he attacks a Liberal.
2. The Liberals must tell voters how they will deal with One Nation. Not talking about the elephant in the room won’t work. Taylor tried that at CPAC on the weekend, and it was a disaster. …
3. If Taylor wants to reconstitute the broad church, it is likely he can only do it by ditching his left flank and embracing his right. …

Where we are now

In Australia, fortunately we are a few years behind the US. Add a few years to these dates:

The US:

In any case, what was center in the 1990s and early 2000s is now called “far-right” and Nazi-adjacent by our left-captured institutions and media:

The country has been run by a broad church of left-wing forces, not just in federal parliament, but across our major institutions, from the ABC to universities to schools and bureaucracies. And that has left the country in a shambles, economically and culturally.

While Hanson and her party have considerable weaknesses, politics is a relative game — many seem to think One Nation can’t possibly be any worse than the major parties. As one Australian reader said recently: “I don’t necessarily want the full Hanson, but I want enough of her to course correct for what is going on today.”

The left has become increasingly divorced from reality, with endless narratives that are plain wrong or at least rely on lying by omission. The rest of us normal people, more in touch with reality, accumulate on the right side of politics — the non-left. If the Liberals remain partly captured by the left, that just leaves the Nationals and One Nation to vote for.

Australian living standards have slipped 40% and we have deindistrialized, because our ruling class didn’t do due diligence on net-zero. By Alan Moran in The Spectator.

Australian governments’ annualised subsidy to renewables is $25 billion (equivalent to about 40 per cent of the Defence budget). This includes just under $7 billion in state government subsidies. … [It] does not include the subsidies (over $700 million per year) to aluminium and other energy-intensive operations, made uncompetitive by Net Zero policies; nor does it include the subsidies to EVs, which amount to about $1.4 billion annually. It also excludes the annual costs, first imposed by the Howard government 20 years ago, of meeting greenhouse gas emission targets by locking up land from development.

Nearly all the reduction in Australia’s greenhouse emissions come in land use change — principally by stopping land clearing, but that’s only because nearly all the desirable land had been cleared by 2005 anyway. (By the way, that was measured by a government program called FullCAM, which I wrote and largely designed.)

Australia’s claimed total reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, 94 per cent have come from land-use restraints, which Barnaby Joyce claimed have cost landowners $100 billion. …

And for this minor effect, Australia de-industrialized and has world-leading electricity prices? Yep:

In real terms, Australia’s electricity prices rose 50-80 per cent over the past 20 years. Countries with much less rigorous emission control policies saw only modest increases (the US), no increase (Vietnam), or lower prices (India).

And far from becoming a magnet for industries seeking cheap power, the latest being AI, Australia has seen much of its manufacturing and refining capacity close down, with previously world-beating smelters now in government hospital care. …

The carbon dioxide theory of global warming is wrong — no one in the Western ruling class did any due diligence, and it is only supported by climate models made by government-funded scientists. As Sir Humphrey explained in Yes Minister, never hold an inquiry unless you know what the answer is going to be:

And the easiest way to ensure the outcome is to control who is doing the inquiring. Climate scientists who disagreed with the carbon dioxide theory were sacked starting in 1982 (with Sherwood Idso), and within a decade only yes-men remained. Those of us who disagreed have been side-lined, kept out of the public eye, ignored, fired, denigrated and silenced.

You don’t have to be climate scientist to notice that:

1. The predictions of the alarmists have not come true (snow in Britain, Arctic, Kilimanjaro, etc.). So many failed predictions.
2. Climate history was rewritten to suit the carbon dioxide theory. (Not sure? Just check the past temperature record in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990 against its 2003 Third Assessment Report and what passes for the past now.)
3. The measurement of global temperature is performed by the bodies pushing the carbon dioxide theory, and their methods are opaque. (Yet even so, the rate of temperature increase they have supposedly measured is considerably less than the minimum predicted in the First Assessment Report in 1990.)

And how much has Australia’s ruling class sunk on this junk theory?

Over the past 20 years, in $2025 terms, Australia has spent between $200 and 240 billion on renewable energy. Without subsidies, none of this would likely have happened. Misallocating what would otherwise be income-enhancing investment capital has contributed to lower investment levels in recent years, resulting in, at best, sluggish economic growth.

Had the money instead been spent on conventional, reliable power stations, it would have bought 40 2GW coal generators – actually twice the current national capacity – or 15 2GW nuclear generators. With coal, our lowest-in-the-world costs provides a comparative advantage.

Now we are poorer:

Per capita income is now declining and, as a nation, our living standards have slipped over the past decade from parity with the US average to levels 40 per cent lower.

Stupidity and intellectual laziness have consequences.

The public however, like with The Voice, have shown good sense. With the exception of 2007, we have voted against net zero at every single Federal election.  Whenever there was a significant difference in policy, we voted against the warmers.

The left built a machine for turning a father’s love for his children into prison time. By Bettina Arndt at Quadrant.

In New South Wales alone, more than 100,000 domestic violence orders are in force at any one time — more than double the number seven years ago. …

Mothers are mostly the ones protected, but since the children’s arrangements run through her, contact with the children stops too. A father is cut off from his children immediately, with no trial, no evidence tested, no finding made. This is state-imposed alienation. How many children it touches, nobody knows, because the government that runs the system has never bothered to count. People everywhere know it is happening and no one wants to talk about it.

Nobody, that is, except David Smith. He is the West Australian dad campaigning to expose what is going on. Boy, is this a man with a mission. He wrote three books and then created an amazing podcast series — All Kids Lives Matter — which is a data-driven investigation into “How Australia’s family-facing systems fail the children they claim to protect — and what the evidence says would fix them.” …

A legal machine came into existence:

Something changed in this country, and it changed fast. In 1987, NSW Local Courts issued 1,462 apprehended violence orders, which at the time were available only between people in a domestic relationship. In 2025, 52,757 domestic AVOs were commenced …

This expansion happened while physical violence was falling, according to the government’s own ABS Personal Safety Survey. For men, the rate fell from 10% to 6.1% since 2005. For women, it fell from 4.7% to 2.9%. Those figures cover violence from anyone, not just partners. …

A system expanding this dramatically while violence declines is not obviously tracking danger. It is tracking something else: policy settings, definitions, and a bureaucracy that keeps growing, regardless of what is happening in people’s homes. ...

Rarely any trail or testing of evidence, just bureaucratic machinery with shocking consequences:

For the great majority of cases, no one ever tests the evidence. … In NSW, an interim AVO can be made “whether or not the defendant is present or has been given notice”. Get that — the bloke doesn’t even need to be told he’s about to be done over!

One study of Victorian courts, reported by the Australian Law Reform Commission, timed the median protection order hearing at three minutes. Three minutes to decide whether a father loses his children. …

Men need to know that living with an AVO means being perpetually at risk of being charged with a criminal offence. All it takes is a breach — namely, any contact with the protected person that the order prohibits. And because children are automatically caught up in these orders, that prohibition usually extends to them too. For a father separated from his children, that means even a text wishing his own child happy birthday can constitute a breach. And a breach is a crime. He can be arrested. He can end up in jail.

This makes ordinary contact a minefield, no matter how careful a man tries to be. A determined ex-partner can turn up at his workplace with the children in tow. She can arrange for them to “bump into” him at the shops. However it happens, the moment he responds — waves, says hello, sends a text — he has breached the order. And just like that, Dad is safely out of the way. Behind bars. …

About 39,600 defendants faced criminal courts in 2023-2024 with breaching a violence order as their principal offence. … More than one hundred people, every single day, walk into a criminal courtroom because of a document no criminal court ever issued. [David Smith] explains:

“A document issued fast, in a civil court, on the civil standard, is the tripwire for mandatory prison. That is the hybrid. Civil to obtain. Criminal to break.”

That design choice — civil to obtain, criminal to break — is the hinge the whole appalling system turns on.

It’s the narrative, interpreted outrageously:

What makes my blood boil is that the public assumes this entire system exists to protect women from dangerous men. That is the story everyone has been told, and it is why almost no one questions how the system actually operates. But the reality is most of these orders have nothing to do with violence at all. …

54% involved an assault charge. 35% involved intimidation or stalking … [which] typically involves threats, intimidation and verbal abuse, not stalking in any conventional sense. And 40% involved a charge of breaching an existing order. … These categories overlap. …

Once a matter reaches the family court, the definition widens again. The Family Law Act defines family violence partly as behaviour that coerces or controls a family member, or “causes the family member to be fearful”. There is no express requirement that the fear be reasonable. The examples run from assault to repeated derogatory taunts, all under one label.

The ever-expanding label “domestic violence” is doing enormous, undifferentiated work. It covers everything from a punch to claims of a heated argument over money, and the system responds to the label the same way regardless of what actually happened. …

The biggest risk factor for delinquency and crime is a fatherless upbringing, but the system encourages it:

The moment one of these orders is made — often before the father even knows it exists — it typically comes with a standard condition: no contact at all. Not reduced contact. Not supervised contact. None. …

By the time anyone looks, a child may have already lost one to two years with a parent — on the strength of an allegation nobody ever tested. And that absence doesn’t stay neutral. Family courts routinely lean on what’s called the “status quo” — the arrangement the child has already been living under — as evidence of what’s now stable and familiar for them. The system creates the absence, then claims it serves the child’s best interests. That isn’t child protection, it’s child abuse. And it’s a system marking its own homework.

From there, the pathway often leads to supervised contact, where the parent — usually a father — pays for the privilege of seeing his children. Often seeing them in some sterile, fluorescent-lit room at a contact centre, a stranger with a clipboard sitting in, every word and gesture noted down, ready to be used against him in court. …

Shockingly, 46% of adults in NSW prisons are now on remand: legally innocent and awaiting trial — the highest proportion ever recorded … About half of the growth in remand over the past two years is due to more domestic violence defendants being held in custody before their court date, and one in three adults on remand is now there over an alleged domestic violence offence.

Imagine if this became a political issue. Only One Nation has the guts to oppose the feminists. (Pauline Hanson mentioned that men are also victims of domestic violence a couple of months ago, and was duly shouted down by the usual suspects.)

The victims of this feminist machine are mostly white men, so who cares? You can be sure it is selectively enforced — men from favored groups either don’t get charged or are punished far less. For example, this week Jeffrey Alan Brown was found guilty of raping four kids over six years in WA, but “Respected elder’s rape sentence reduced for ‘significant connection to country’” — any excuse will do. Imagine if people from any group other than white men were being treated so unfairly and then imprisoned and alienated from their children? Stolen children times 100!

20 year old girls — smart, capable, hard working and cute — can’t get a date.

What’s wrong with Western society we can’t even get this right?

The dating market is shifting quite rapidly at the moment. While the Wentworth Report doesn’t normally pay it much attention, the reasons are inappropriate policies from the left.

Chris Hatch:

I am surrounded by 20 year old girls in my life that are smart, capable, hard working and cute. Nobody is dating them. Not sure what the deal is, but I don’t get it.

Amy Curtis:

Because young men have learned that if they date a girl and it goes bad, she can come back and accuse them of rape two years after the fact.

She can strangle his children and the media will circle the wagons to protect her.

She can divorce him and take half of everything.

That’s why.

Commenters:

Man can’t get a date: “What’s wrong with me?”

Woman can’t get a date: “What’s wrong with men?” …

Misandry has consequences.

Related:

Merry Old England has a new Mayor.

This is the new mayor of Ealing, London with her constituents. Conquest on full display. https://t.co/ezYzdsvmIv

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 11, 2026

Ealing is a district and major metropolitan center located in West London, approximately 7.5 miles (12.1 km) west of Charing Cross. In the western part of Greater London:

 

What a difference government policy can make:

hat-tip David Archibald

Software technoapocalypse: AI can now convert executables to source code, so secrecy is gone. By Eric S. Raymond.

The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.

In this example, Eric recovered the source code (what humans write, with language words and comments) from the binary (the program file your computer runs, just 0’s and 1’s for your processor). This was impossible until very recently.

I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal [a computer language popular in the 1990s] from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust [the emerging systems programming language, the successor to the C language] and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.

The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn’t have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.

A revolution in the economics and use of software is arriving:

This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.

I say “almost” because there is going to be one way to maintain secrecy. Software as a service with the executable hiding behind a network connection to the cloud. But as of now, we must assume that anything shipped as an executable, or even a firmware image, is as transparent as glass. It won’t keep its secrets for any longer than it takes for somebody to be motivated to throw an LLM at it.

I did not see this coming. When I wrote down the theory of open source, 30 years ago now, I thought closed source would be gradually driven towards extinction by cost gradients, but survive indefinitely in certain niches. I did not foresee it being wiped out in a technoapocalypse. …

Legal impediments? Not really:

There are still some obstacles. In US law, decompilation of a binary is a derivative work of the binary that falls under whatever copyright it had. However, it is also settled law that if you decompile binary code to a precise specification of what it does, then generate fresh code from that without looking at the decompiled stuff, you’re in the clear. This was the case law that allowed PC clones to exist, after Phoenix Technologies reverse engineered the original IBM PC BIOS.

The two-step process — binary to specification to unencumbered code — will no longer takes a large number of programmers and years of development time. With an LLM, it’s now a thing you can do in a day. Ubiquity will make it impractical to prosecute all the people who might skip the specification step.

Wiggling already:

Forced migration from shipped binaries to tied cloud services [where the actual computation is run on the software company’s servers, not on your computer] will be tried — Adobe pioneered this, and Microsoft is pushing it as hard as they can given that their OS is a binary that has to run locally. Both companies are seeing massive user revolts over this. There is good reason to doubt that it’s a strategy that can hold customers in the long term.

Also, a lot of things can’t safely be tied to the cloud at all, because they can’t tolerate a random network outage. Machine tools, medical devices…

Technoapocalypse:

A whole lot of proprietary software business models are going to collapse. Hard. One that I think might survive is tax software; being able to decompile it doesn’t necessarily do you a lot of good because its actual value is tracking a ruleset that changes over time and has to be maintained by vendor specialists. But cases like this are unusual. …

We’re entering a new world, with a lot of ancient comfortable assumptions being blown up. It’s going to be fun to watch.

Microsoft Office has just been decoded. By Jhet Borja, at Tom’s Hardware.

Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude.

Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.

Eric S. Raymond:

Brandon Thomas isn’t just trying to provide compatible replacements for these tools. He’s attempting to break the entire enshittified business model that produced them.

Power transferring from nation states to big tech companies. By Joel Kotkin at spiked.

These elite tech companies are far more powerful than Trump or any state apart from China. Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are individually all worth more than Italy, Canada, Brazil, Russia or Mexico. More importantly, these companies increasingly dominate information flows, much of Hollywood and, most disturbingly, have gained an unprecedented hold on society, particularly among younger generations.

Our era is marked by a shift in geopolitical influence from governments towards a handful of elite tech firms which, as National Affairs notes, constitute ‘new superpowers’ on the global stage. …

The relationship between the oligarchs and the political elite more closely resembles that between the barons and King John at Runnymede — although there’s no contemporary Magna Carta in the offing. A clearly cowed Trump [King John] has called for light-touch supervision of AI, which no doubt pleases most of the oligarchs [barons]….

The left might do a deal allowing big tech to rule in partnership with a lefty bureaucratic state:

In all probability, the Democrats will offer something that empowers the current tech oligarchy through a lethal combination of corporate and state power. This was the model favoured by the Biden administration.

Free-market competition, generally the best means of preventing an excessive concentration of power, will give way to AI-empowered oligopolies capable of eliminating competition with what have been described as ‘algorithmic firing squads’. …

Firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic have maintained close links with the Democrats, even as some of their representatives savage them in the press. Sam Altman recently praised governor Gavin Newsom as ‘thoughtful’ on AI.

The right wing techs (at least at the leadership level) include SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril. Most tech employees in California are still solidly pro-Democrat.

Western social media affected by Ukrainian strikes on Russian AI centers. By Brave AI.

Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers in late October 2026 have significantly disrupted Russian bot networks, causing a drastic drop in automated social media activity. (Yandex is Russia’s equivalent to Google.)

By targeting the infrastructure hosting 70% of Russian searches and training AI models, the strikes crippled the backend systems many propaganda bots relied on for coordination and deployment.

 

On the night of October 8, 2026, the Defense Forces of Ukraine successfully struck a data center in the city of Sasovo (Ryazan Oblast, Russia), which is one of the largest data processing and storage centers of the Russian IT company Yandex.
54.37341, 41.939628
#UkrainerussiaWar https://t.co/wVdKTRSfro

— Absolutely reliable source (@absreliable) October 8, 2026

The outages affected the servers supporting bot farms responsible for spreading misinformation, manipulating public opinion, and amplifying divisive content across platforms like X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Researchers and users noted a dramatic decline in suspicious engagement, fake accounts, and coordinated posting campaigns, effectively silencing millions of suspected Russian bot accounts.

The Sasovo data center previously hosted two of the three Yandex supercomputers, which were used to train its YandexGPT large language model.

Jarosław Wolski (a lefty):

De-Russified internet (due to Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers) suddenly reveals wonders in the socials:

• support for AfD in social media has dropped by 56%.
• fewer “Polish” accounts inciting against Ukrainians
• fewer “Ukrainian” ones inciting against Poles
• support for MAGA online has sharply fallen.

Waiting for further measurable results of the sudden drops in support for Gaśniczakokacapów, AfD, Trump, etc.

 

 

How much of the Western — particularly US — politics is driven by Russian and Chinese bots and Pakistani influencers masquerading as Western citizens?

For instance, on Joanne’s blog (which allows comments) there are always a couple of what are almost certainly Chinese trolls — commenters who flare up at the appearance of anything that lowers the status of the CCP.

If any accounts you follow went off line for the last few days, they are probably Russian bots.

hat-tip David Archibald

Melbourne Islamic centre linked to UAE flight terror. By Oscar Godsell at News24.

Mr al-Hammami has been accused of attempting to hijack a passenger jet and crash the aircraft into an Israeli airport. …

UAE Attorney-General Hamad Saif al-Shamsi said the man had provided a detailed confession following his arrest over the alleged September 30, 2026, mid-air attack.

The UAE authorities allege the pilot’s radicalisation began while he was studying in Melbourne in 2017, when he was exposed to extremist literature and propaganda. …

“He was influenced by Takfiri ideology through reading extremist literature and following online content glorifying terrorist organisations and suicide attacks.” …

“The suspect admitted that, while studying in Melbourne, Australia, he regularly attended a mosque affiliated with (RMIT),” Emirates News Agency reported. …

Years of preparation:

Authorities said he had allegedly chosen a career in aviation specifically to carry out a mass-casualty attack inspired by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.

Are their votes worth it?

The Albanese government gave more than $68,000 in taxpayer funding to a Melbourne Islamic centre linked to the accused Israel-bound flight attacker. …

The program, administered by the federal Department of Home Affairs, was intended to help young people learn or maintain languages other than English.