The Sunset of the Uniparty. By Tony Abbott in Quadrant.

As the smoke from budget week clears, one thing is obvious: the era of the uniparty is over. And not before time, as it’s been the Liberal Party’s political timidity that’s driven the rise of One Nation, with conservative voters despairing of ever again having a champion to vote for.

Until now. Because by committing a future Coalition government to ending bracket creep — taxation by stealth — Taylor has made the next election wealth creation versus wealth redistribution, thereby pitching the Liberals as the party of aspiration rather than the party of resentment.

I doubt Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have quite grasped the scale of their blunder, especially after stressing how much this budget is a reflection of “Labor values”. Higher taxes on property and heavier taxes on wealth creation are not just broken promises with no redeeming policy feature (and no exculpatory circumstances beyond their control). They’re an assault on the Australian dream that people who strive to get ahead should not be punished for their efforts and that people who “have a go” should get a “fair go” from government.

After pretending in 2022 to be “safe change” and in 2025 to be protection against cost of living increases, Albanese Labor has revealed its class war instincts as the party of ever bigger government set on redistributing wealth from owners to workers — as if workers have no aspiration to become owners too. …

Finally both parties are showing their real colours after a decade when they mostly tried to be a slightly more attractive version of the other side, with the Coalition just a little less enthusiastic than Labor for big government, climate action, and mass migration.

Unsurprisingly, it was the Coalition’s inability to decide whether it was for or against the politics of climate and identity; being against, then for, and then against Net Zero; and being concerned, then indifferent, before being concerned again, about record migration, that’s fueled the rise of political alternatives.

Especially after the Bondi massacre confirmed to many Australians that the country we thought we knew was quickly slipping away; and which seems to have triggered the sudden surge in poll support for One Nation from single digits to roughly that of both major parties. …

Taylor has declared no more “Labor lite” Liberals…. His pledge to cut all of Labor’s Net Zero spending and his willingness to restrict welfare payments to Australian citizens shows a seriousness about spending discipline, plus the fighting spirit the Liberals have largely lacked since the Turnbull coup in 2015.

But on immigration Tony, will the Liberal Party finally do what Australian voters want, after so many squandered opportunities?

And what about all those uniparty people in the Liberal Party machine? Where are they going to go?

Is Taylor really going to staunch the wealth loss and corruption that goes on under the fantasy of net zero?

The diploma divide is replacing wealth and income as the primary division in western politics. By Samuel Thawley in The Spectator.

Many Western democracies are going through the same political realignment. The diploma divide – the sorting of electorates by education, specialisation, and institutional disposition – is replacing wealth and income as the primary cleavage. Australia arrived later. However, it will resolve faster – with preferential voting as the accelerant rather than stabiliser. The structural earthquake here will be shorter, sharper, and – if the data hold – largely complete in the span of the next two to three elections. …

Trump saved the Republican Party:

The standard narrative across the Western commentariat — left and right — is that Donald Trump degraded the Republican Party. He trashed its norms, alienated its professionals, and turned it into a personality cult. This is the story told over glasses of wine in Toorak and over flat whites in Balmain.

The structural story is the opposite.

Almost every centre-right party in the Western world today is facing the same centrifugal force: the diploma divide is tearing its coalition apart. The professional wing — the university-educated, socially progressive, economically liberal urban voter –is departing in one direction. The non-graduate wing — culturally conservative, economically interventionist, institutionally hostile — is leaving in the other. The leaders have failed to hold both simultaneously because the interests have now become too disparate. …

The Coalition in Australia is losing voters simultaneously to teal independents on its left and One Nation on its right.

The only traditional, majority right party to survive has been the Republicans in the US. The reason is obvious: Trump’s arrival. His structural function was not to ‘ruin’ the Republican Party but to resolve the tension destroying every comparable party elsewhere. He captured the party machinery via the presidential primary system, fused the populist insurgency into the major party, and expelled the professional wing rather than allow the non-graduate wing to split itself off. …

He didn’t persuade the Republican machine – he bypassed it, going directly to voters in a system which permitted exactly that. Westminster systems do not have open primaries. The preselection process is the institutional gate.

Trump’s Republicans are unique. Everywhere else in the West, the main right wing party is dying as it splits:

The leader who best understands the emerging electorate is precisely the person the machine cannot tolerate, because the qualities making him or her effective outside the party — directness, conviction, disruptive energy — are the qualities threatening the machine’s internal equilibrium. …

Almost no party instance across the Anglosphere since the start of politics has succeeded long-term by expelling the rebel or coopting the outlier. … The institution almost always fights back and the propagation ultimately fails. …

Trump is the sole possible counterfactual. He succeeded in capturing the party because the primary system exists — and this has given him a particular strength that earlier hopefuls have not enjoyed. However, the question remains for 2026 and 2028 — and for the long-term: will the Republican party and its leadership continue his legacy, or will Trumpism join the Thatcher-Abbott class, and Trump see all his work undone? …

One Nation may become the main conservative party in Australia:

The addressable market is defined not by self-identity, not by geography, but by status or social position. It is the non-graduate, the tradesman, the self-employed contractor, the outer-urban family priced out of the inner ring, the regional voter who has watched institutional trust drain out of every authority that used to speak for him or her. The constituency is not a niche – it is now the largest single voting bloc in Australia that no establishment party currently treats as its primary constituency.

One Nation’s ceiling is status-bounded and diffuse. … So is Reform UK’s in Britain. These are once-fringe parties whose potential constituency is larger than the party they are seeking to displace because the group they represent is now bigger than the established electorate that the incumbent, devotedly centrist, party, has decided to prioritise. …

What’s in a name?

The National Party, as one of the longest-serving political organisations in the country, has the benefit of incumbency. It also has the benefit of a name that most precisely fits the emerging voter demographic.

The Liberal Party has a complicated name, reflecting an ideology that no longer aligns well with the electorate it needs to win.

Meanwhile, One Nation — whose name enjoys a solid historical pedigree — sounds more like a multicultural welcome and, ironically, a certain openness to immigration.

The Nationals have the potential:

Moreover, the National Party is already well-positioned to leverage distinctive elements of the Australian electorate that mix hints of the MAGA movement in America and the Reform movement in Britain. …

The only realistic opponent One Nation faces is the National Party, but — as the defections of Barnaby Joyce in one direction and Jacinta Price in the other both hint — the party has decided not to fight. …

The likely future of the Australian Liberal Party:

Under Australian preferential voting, the Liberal Party’s realistic forward path might be more like Germany’s SPD under repeated grand coalitions: declining by five to nine primary-vote points in each grand-coalition cycle, never quite collapsing, never quite recovering, becoming a party whose continued existence is structurally necessary to the system but whose paradigm-carrying role has ended.

The Teals have removed the professional-class left flank. One Nation is removing the non-graduate right flank — something that the Nationals could do as well if they wanted. What remains is a rump constituency: economically liberal, socially centrist, institutionally attached, declining as a share of the population in every election cycle.

The West’s rivals hobbled western industry and are now targeting data centers. By John Hinderaker at Powerline.

For many years the Soviet Union, and then Russia, financed the environmental movement in the United States. Their purpose was to suppress American production of oil and gas, and they succeeded to a considerable degree, to their own great benefit.

Today, we are in the midst of another kind of race with Communist China — the race to develop superior systems of artificial intelligence. The Chinese Communist Party knows that if it wins this race, it will contribute greatly to its dreams of world domination, while if it loses, China, with its rapidly shrinking population, could be on the way to the garbage dump of history. So the stakes are enormous.

To develop superior forms of artificial intelligence, massive quantities of computing power are required. This mostly takes the form of data centers. So America’s tech titans are trying to develop data centers (referred to by some as “intelligence factories”) across the U.S. Yet wherever they go, opposition arises, seemingly from the grass roots. Bad arguments are made against data centers — they will raise electricity rates, they consume vast quantities of water, they make noise — misinformation is spread, and opposition is organized. In many cases, such local opposition has been successful.

Observers have wondered where this opposition — seemingly grass roots, but also remarkably well-organized, consistent, and well-funded — comes from.

Kevin O’Leary put a data science team on the question, and came up with startling conclusions: the opposition to data centers comes largely from the Communist Chinese Party, laundered through liberal American NGOs:

 

We uncovered something far bigger than I ever expected. After seeing coordinated false attacks against the Utah data center project, we brought in an advanced data science team to trace where the content was coming from and the results were shocking. What we found led back to… pic.twitter.com/O870aqpjKr

— Kevin O’Leary aka Mr. Wonderful (@kevinolearytv) May 25, 2026

 

From a new report:

Power The Future’s new report “Manufactured Outrage: How National Environmental Activists Are Spending Millions to Elect Democrats, Block Data Centers, and Undermine President Trump’s Pro-Growth Agenda” exposes a coordinated, billionaire-funded and potentially foreign-backed campaign to obstruct data center and Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure development across the United States. …

The report finds the anti-data-center movement is not grassroots, but a coordinated national campaign fueled by massive political spending and activist organizations aligned with partisan goals. Among the findings: …

• The report exposes a coordinated campaign led by national eco-left groups such as the Sierra Club, Food & Water Watch, Earthjustice, and the Southern Environmental Law Center, backed by dark money networks to stop data center projects across the country.
• More than $150 million was spent by these same environmental groups to elect Democrats in 2024, before pivoting to target data center development nationwide.
• The Arabella/Sunflower network disbursed approximately $1 billion in grants in 2023, funding advocacy campaigns while shielding donor identities. …
• More than 300 anti-data-center bills were filed across 30+ states in just six weeks, demonstrating a level of coordination far beyond local opposition.

Interference by a foreign power:

In 2016, the Democratic Party generated hysteria over supposed (but almost entirely fictitious) interference by a foreign power in our election.

What is going on now appears to be real, not fabricated, and it likely will impact our country’s future far more than a single presidential election. The influence of the Chinese Communist Party on local, supposedly grass roots activism needs to be investigated and, as appropriate, exposed.

Never stand between a leftist and a source of funding.

Anti-male bigotry rampant in order to reduce western population. By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone.

Imagine the following message in a public space: Caution: Area of Frequent Attempts at Reputational Destruction by Females

I have never seen a sign bearing the above message in any public space, nor do I want to.

Similarly, I have never seen a sign near a heavily African American neighborhood that says, “Caution, entering an area in which your chances of being the victim of a violent crime are statistically proven to be much higher than in other places.”

And again, I do not want to.

My reasons for not wanting to ever read these things are, or should be, self-evident to any reasonably thoughtful person: it is never permissible in a society that purports to be democratic to have the state apparatus cast moral aspersions upon an entire subset of the culture on the basis of that subset’s immutable characteristics.

But men are now fair game for such bigotry in the West:

And yet, in many municipalities in the US and Europe there is a trend toward posting signs in public transport that, in various levels of explicitness, point toward all men as being gropers and harassers in potencia.

For example, on a recent ride on the transport system of the Catalan Government I was informed, via messages on the wall of the rail car, that public entity will have “Zero tolerance with male violence” in the public areas it administers. …

How do they demonize men?

How might you gain a preemptive victory against increasing legions of often quite justly pissed-off males?

Easy. Use the culture-planning tools at your disposal as a member of the ultra-elite to systematically denigrate the “toxic” nature of traditional male attributes.

And there is no better way do this than to do this than to seize upon one of the more ugly manifestations of traditional male behavior — sexual violence — and use it as a cudgel to discredit male attributes in general, including positive ones like the setting of hard limits, physical bravery in the face of hardship and unjust governance, and the desire to protect valuable social norms and traditions against the erosive forces of planned or unplanned social entropy.

Why do they demonize men? Why is this particular form of bigotry ok with the globalists? What is intended to achieve?

For some time now, it has been clear to anyone who has taken the time to look, that our current super-elites have an enormous disdain toward the vast majority of the human beings with whom they share the planet …

For example, Curtis Yarvin … has spoken openly about the coming “dire problem” of what to do with what he calls the “mindless mass,” which is to say the excess of useless human beings …

His solution? To house and feed them but keep them enclosed in a virtual world, supported by high quality virtual reality …

But, of course, an even better approach than this one would be to ensure that most of these useless eaters never get born in the first place.

They want to reduce the birth rate so they share the planet with fewer “useless eaters”. Here’s how they are doing it:

One [approach] is to run campaigns designed to convince confused and/or mentally ill teenagers that mutilating their sex organs is a lasting solution to their current unhappiness. Another is to rhetorically elevate abortion from the status it has had in all virtually healthy cultures up until now — a regrettable but perhaps occasionally necessary evil — to that of an unmitigated cultural good.

But perhaps the simplest one of all is to convince one or the other side of the male-female dynamic that their would-be partners in procreation generally cannot be trusted to safeguard their own well-being or that of their would-be children.

Hence, the current effort on public transport and in other public spaces to cast doubt upon the ability of the men in those places to act in a civilized and dignity-supporting manner.

And it is working. And if you don’t believe me, take the time to speak to the 16–35-year-old cohort of women in your life, especially if they attended a “prestigious” institute of higher learning.

Just as sure as they “know” that in every generation previous to their own queer-beating was a widely accepted and widely enjoyed sport among most straight men, they are “sure” that a happy and respectful complementarity of function in relations between men and women rarely, if ever existed in the past, and that the reason for this was that most men simply could not control their inherent need to dominate women and prevent them from becoming happy and fully developed individuals.

Is it any wonder that births are reaching historically low levels in most Western countries?

Yes, economics has a good deal to do with this phenomenon. But blaming it all on that obviates the fact that people have tended to reproduce through thick and thin throughout history. …

Young females are notoriously the most amenable to propaganda. Hence the anti-male bigotry:

And so here we are, with government-financed signs in public places that subtly but clearly suggest that people born male should be viewed by women not as noble protectors or carriers of wisdom or the many other positive things they often are, but as lurking vectors of violence.

Who wins with that message? It’s certainly not most men, nor for that matter most women.

It does work, however, for those super-elites who for reasons related to their obsessive drive to control resources as well as the comportment of their fellow human beings would like to see more social atomization, weaker families and communities, and ultimately fewer useless eaters to contend with.

And it is practiced on western populations, not African, Muslim, or Asian:

The deepest class divide: Hard work in a treadmill versus understanding money and assets. By SightBringer.

The deepest class divide is no longer between workers and non-workers.

It is between people who understand the monetary game and people who donate their life-force into it without understanding the rules.

Hard work inside bad money becomes a treadmill.

A person can be disciplined, honest, useful, productive, and still get quietly harvested if their savings sit in a melting unit while assets, housing, equities, land, gold, Bitcoin, and monopoly businesses absorb monetary expansion.

Here is the game you need to learn:

The system rewards proximity to scarce assets more than raw effort.

That is the hidden insult beneath modern capitalism: labor remains morally praised while ownership captures the compounding.

The average person is taught income. The elite understands balance sheets.

The average person asks how to earn more. The elite asks what unit to hold wealth in, what assets reprice upward when money expands, what debts get inflated away, what tax structures protect capital, and what scarcity claims cannot be printed. …

Society runs on the labor of people who work for the money needed to live:

It needs most people running. Working, borrowing, consuming, refinancing, paying taxes, chasing credentials, holding cash, fearing volatility, and calling financial literacy “risky” while their purchasing power gets diluted in slow motion. …

Lesson:

The real formula is: produce value, own scarce assets, understand the unit. That is the escape path.

Final compression: the modern trap is not laziness.

It is productive obedience inside a monetary system designed to transfer time from workers to asset owners.

Got gold? The money system is breaking down under the inevitable corruption of the ability to print money, as evidence by the monotonic and accelerating debt build-up.

Gold is the asset most likely to benefit next (and since 2022). If you’re interested, subscribe to GoldNerds and mention this post, and I’ll email you my current portfolio (which is not financial advice, but what I’m doing in my circumstance).

The Narrative on Multiculturalism has Changed. By Alice Smith.

The old, romantic view of multiculturalism was food, festivals and colourful clothes.

The new, realistic view of multiculturalism is grooming gangs, cousin marriage, polygamy, child rape, self-imposed segregation, tribal feuds, honour killings, and filth.

Those on the left (who benefit from immigrant votes) pretend not to have got the memo, but they knew all along (by Zarathustra):

Commenters:

There’s no way Obama was sincere about this. …

Maybe. It’s more interesting as a historical thermometer of where Democrats were, and how radically they’ve shifted. Saying this today would be career-ending. …

I feel like the Obamas have really gone the way of the Clintons as far as their reputation among left leaning voters. They were once poster children and are now bordering on disavowed. …

There is a long list of quotes that major Democrats said in the 2010s to the 90s which are now considered far right extreme talking points. …

Then they realized mass migration was the only way they could win elections

Iran War Update. Three interesting points of view.

AG:

I hope people understand what’s happening because it’s been the same story over and over again.

The Islamic Republic and their allies leak their preferred details as if they are agreed to western sources. Then when U.S. refuses to agree to those absurd terms and insists we stick to the deal that had already been under discussion, they claim the U.S. is backing out of the deal.

Then they blame America or Israeli influence for the lack of a deal instead of The Islamic Republic making unreasonable demands for a settlement after they lost the military fight and are facing an economic crisis.

We saw the same thing with Gaza repeatedly.

Gerard Baker in the WSJ:

Let’s start with the most important point about the agreement President Trump is apparently about to sign with Iran. There were no good options. …

That’s what you get when you launch a strategic expedition on a tide of hubris and ignorance, a “little excursion” you insist will end in “four to five weeks” in “the unconditional surrender” of your enemy — an enemy so obdurate that it values its own existence far above the lives of its own people. …

It’s unfair to blame Mr Trump alone, because this strategic failure is not new for the US. It’s also what you get when you embroil yourself in another conflict in the greater Middle East based on a bleakly familiar combination of misjudgments: a massive underestimation of the enemy’s defensive capabilities and will to resist, and a massive overestimation of your own offensive capabilities and will to prosecute a costly war to a conclusion.

So, yes, negotiating the best deal was the right choice. What were the alternatives? Maintain the state of blockade and siege? That would have done greater harm to the US and world economy, with limited chance of success. Return to the bombing campaign? More costly depletion of munitions, jeopardizing our other military commitments, in exchange for reparable damage to Iran’s military infrastructure.

Escalation? That might have promised a more conclusive outcome. But how likely was it and at what cost?

Howard Kunstler:

The news media apparently forgot what it broadcast a couple of weeks ago: Iran’s oil storage capacity was nearing the red-line. If the wells have to be shut-in, such is the geology that it would wreck the oil fields themselves. Perhaps this is happening now. Nobody is reporting on it. But the news media doesn’t really report on anything. It opines. It spins. It constructs story-lines for advantage, it gaslights, it perverts the consensus about reality out of existence, it just plain lies.

If Iran is jerking the US around again, this will be the last time. They will prove to be negotiation-incapable, as the Russian phrase goes. They will punch their own express ticket back to the 12th century, lights out, bridges down across the rugged terrain, back to donkey carts, magic lamps, and vizeers instead of mullahs.

Outside of the participants, who knows?

The Carbon Dioxide Scare Is Gradually Dying. By Peter Clack:

Harsh climate scenarios have spent decades painting Earth’s likely future landscape as dystopian, dark, barren and forbidding.

Yet, recent physical data argues exactly the opposite. Instead of plunging the planet into chaos, it’s becoming eye-catchingly greener — and CO₂ is the key. The formal models predicted a scorched planet, but NASA satellites unleashed a world that is biologically thriving. This silent miracle of global greening isn’t some theory, it’s the physical reality captured by the orbiting space platforms; MODIS instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites.

This is how these jarring narratives have been unfolding:

• Official Climate Narrative: Rapid, systemic desertification and global canopy loss due to rising temperatures.
• Hard Reality: Persistent structural greening across more than 30% of the global vegetated area over the last two decades.

 

• Official Climate Narrative: CO₂ acts strictly as a destructive atmospheric pollutant driving extreme weather.
• Hard Reality: CO₂ is plant food, driving down stomatal conductance, making plants use water more efficiently and expanding the leaf area index

 

• Official Climate Narrative: Global food supply chains are on the verge of climate-driven collapse.
• Hard Reality: Agricultural yields bolstered by CO₂ fertilisation are expanding green cover in semi-arid zones like the African Sahel and Western Australia. …

 

Higher, more robust CO₂ is not a death sentence — which is what they argued. It allows vegetation to open their pores (stomata) less, yet absorb the same amount of carbon. This drastically reduces water loss through transpiration. It’s why the world’s arid desert regions are blooming and the fragile living desert is raging into life — plants are also becoming more drought-resistant. …

A vividly coloured renaissance is dutifully taking place, sweeping away all doubts.

 

Global greening in action near Bega, NSW

 

Steve Guest:

[Left-wing] Vox with a BOMBSHELL admission in the wake of the demise of RCP8.5. [the alarming official climate scenario that was recently officially dropped as too unrealistic]:

“Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.”

Commenters:

I appreciate the honesty here, but there were plenty of people (like me) who have been saying this for decades. We were called climate science deniers by the press. We told the truth. We were attacked for it. Now people act as if it was not obvious at the time. …

It was absolutely obvious at the time that scientists were using fake models to scare people about climate change. That’s the truth, and every person who participated in that charade owes a lot of apologies to the people who they smeared.  …

The worst consequence of their alarmist reporting is 15+ yrs of horrific energy policy like RPS & net zero that cost Americans billions of dollars. Democrats, NGOs, and media all championed the “energy transition” to save the planet. I have no sympathy for lazy reporting. …

“I didn’t always know” is a bold-faced lie. Every climate journalist could have looked at the data and seen what a scam the hockey stick was from day 1 — they just didn’t want to.

Skeptic Research Center Team:

Around 1 in 3 liberals think the world will end in 10-15 years because of climate change.

Musa al-Gharbi:

It’s a big problem that tons of climate journalism/ discourse has consistently used the worst case outlier model and presented it as a prediction of what was most likely to happen. But as it stands, even the worst-case scenario is being radically adjusted down. Hopefully climate journalists/ advocates don’t just adopt the next worst-case model and instead discuss the most likely scenarios modelers have painted.

The Floyd/BLM riots were the most destructive riots in American history; hardly anyone knows. By the Skeptic Research Center Team.

One of the most persistent false beliefs in American culture is that the Floyd/BLM riots were incredibly peaceful, causing little damage to life and property.

In fact, the Floyd/BLM riots were the most destructive riots in American history, leading insurance agencies to designate them as a “catastrophe event.”

 

Thomas Johansmeyer at Inver Re (an insurance company):

US civil unrest became a significant insurance industry problem in 2020, arguably for the first time. …

There were only 12 riot and civil disorder catastrophe events from 1950 through 2019. The largest was the 1992 riot in Los Angeles at nearly $800 million in insured losses (not adjusted for inflation). And even that was an outlier. The average loss to the insurance industry from riot and civil disorder catastrophes over those 70 years was only around $90 million.

In 2020, the George Floyd protests became the first civil disorder catastrophe event to exceed $1 billion in losses to the insurance industry. In fact, it has exceeded $2 billion so far and could still go higher. This “catastrophe event” was also the first to affect more than one state.

The left are lying, big time:

Sunny Hostin: “There was very limited destruction of property and violence during the BLM uprising.”

Sunny Hostin: “There was very limited destruction of property and violence during the BLM uprising.” pic.twitter.com/owL8818Ity

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) May 21, 2026

 

Reality:

 

Germa Revolta:

There were 37 murders associated with the Floyd/BLM riots. Besides David Dorn whose murderer was arrested and tried, most of the victims got no media and their murders are unresolved. If you mention it online, the left calls you a liar. The irony? A large percentage were black.

The Counter-revolution might look like this. By James Kunstler.

The Lefty-left is mainly about acquiring power through bad faith in order to push everyone around, tell them what they’re allowed to want out of life, and severely punish anyone who objects to that treatment.

What’s often overlooked is the role that sadism plays in the psychology of the Lefty-left. They seem to love it when illegal aliens rape and strangle 19-year-old American girls. (You don’t hear them deplore it, do you? Their house-organ, The New York Times, won’t even report it.) More than anything they want to subject you to the most savage humiliations.

We are at a dangerous pass this Memorial Day. Mr. Trump and his people are methodically rearranging the works to expel these grifting demons. Their resistance to being expelled will manifest in ever more dirty fighting as spring blossoms into a summer of violent “activism.” They will try as hard as possible to wreck the country’s 250th birthday celebrations. It might look like civil war. They will not stop trying to kill Donald Trump and possibly other figures around him. Even if they manage that, it will not stop what it is coming for them.

This time around nobody believes their sob stories, their whining about “oppression,” their bullshit about “equity” and “justice.” This time, they will not be allowed to get away with sheer lawlessness. They will not be able to pass off fake martyrs such as George Floyd. The elections this time — if they can happen — will be clean and fair. That can be the only way they will be allowed to happen.

This will be the most emphatic counter-revolution in modern history, a complete rejection of childish unreality — the cavalcade of absurdities you have been told to swallow for a mad decade:

• That you can change your sex “assigned at birth.” (Assigned by whom? By some cosmic committee of gender komisars?)
• That merit has no merit (don’t be good at anything).
• That men and maleness represent some inferior way of being human?
• That people from outside American society, from faraway lands, deserve to live here under a special gift economy of vast subsidies, at your expense, to set up antagonistic counter-cultures?
• That words don’t mean what they mean?

Possibly related???

The Musk Empire is leading humanity into space. By Glenn Reynolds.

Damn, how I wish [science fiction author] Jerry Pournelle could be watching this. …

When I was still a kid, I read Jerry’s column “A Step Farther Out” in Galaxy magazine religiously. Jerry saw it all coming: vertical takeoff and landing spaceships, the need to lower costs to orbit, and the absolute necessity for both reusability and launch volume to make things cheap enough, and reliable enough, to build an interplanetary economy. He wrote about the immense resources of space (both in terms of energy and material), and the wide-open human future they could support. …

There are still bugs to work out, and capabilities to add, but what we saw on Friday was a full-fledged interplanetary spaceship. Starship v.3 is big enough to carry cargoes to the Moon and Mars. It uses methane fuel which … can be manufactured on-site from the Martian atmosphere using 19th Century chemical technology.  …

It will also support missions to asteroids, which are loaded with precious and valuable metals, carbon compounds, and other useful stuff. (Even rock is useful for radiation shielding, and using stuff that’s already in space is generally cheaper than launching it from Earth.)

A moon base is practical with Starship. Artemis, for all the hype, uses NASA’s SLS rocket, which is based on technology over half a century old — Congress mandated that it use Space Shuttle technology — and costs literally billions per launch.

Large structures in Earth orbit are practical with Starship. Elon wants to build data centers in orbit, and others are following his lead. …

Space solar power plants, converting the 24-hour, unfiltered sunlight of outer space into electricity that is beamed to Earth via microwave (a technology long-since demonstrated) are practical with Starship.

And it’s not just lift capacity. The Musk empire also stresses AI and robotics. When we were thinking about large space structures in the 1970s we assumed they’d be built by humans, like offshore oil rigs. In my Space Law seminar last fall we did some rough modeling on how much faster you could build them using robots controlled by AI. The answer was rough, but clear: Much, much faster. And more cheaply, and without labor issues. …

 

 

After the mission concluded, the SpaceX crew was chanting “USA! USA!” Jerry always said that it was nearly certain that space would ultimately be settled by humans, but that it would make a big difference which humans got there first.

The USA is the planet’s beacon of freedom and hope — and, frankly, the only country that could have supported the development of a company like SpaceX, with a freewheeling and creative yet utterly results-oriented culture. If we get there first, the coming millennium will look very different than it would if it was, say, China who got there first.

The US still wins things.

If Elon Musk were in Australia, Anthony Albanese would be a 47% partner in all he does. How demotivating!

Bigger government or less government? Suddenly there’s a choice in Australia. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.

Bigger government:

Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers delivered a nation-changing budget that decisively cast off the milquetoast centrism they’d affected … It embraced instead the wild big ­government, massive spending, hyper-regulating approach of Gough Whitlam and Jim Cairns in the disastrous 1972 to 1975 Labor administration, which so savagely damaged the Australian economy.

This is a budget of historic consequence, a nation-changing moment.

Less government:

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s speech in reply was equally historic. Just as Labor is proposing a European approach but worse than Europe, which no Australian government has attempted since Whitlam, Taylor is proposing a counter-revolution.

Taylor’s declaratory ambition is as great as that of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Malcolm Fraser, the big conservatives the dysfunctional 1970s threw up. …

Taylor has committed to specifics which the Liberals can’t now run away from. They would transform Australia if implemented. Taylor’s key promise is to index tax brackets. At the moment, inflation relentlessly pushes income earners into higher tax brackets — bracket creep. It’s confiscatory and guarantees ever bigger government. It’s dishonest. Government grows by stealth.

Chalmers claims Taylor’s policy would cost $250bn over a decade. That demonstrates bracket creep’s moral and economic infamy. For anything which tax indexation “costs” is the extra amount government will take from taxpayers through bracket creep.

Taylor isn’t promising tax cuts, just tax neutrality. Government has become addicted to relentless, ultimately ruinous, tax increases. Nonetheless, Taylor’s tax indexation would be hard to sustain.

If a government wanted to do new things it would need to explicitly raise new taxes or cut out something else.

CGT and net zero, strangely keeping quiet:

Taylor promised to reverse the weird, damaging increases in tax on capital gains. He explicitly, even fiercely, rejected net zero. That’s Coalition policy yet hardly any Liberal frontbencher talks about it. But you can’t win arguments by silence. Opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson, in a generally good Press Club speech, didn’t mention net zero and only cited tax indexation once.

You can’t prosecute policy revolution from opposition by stealth. Every sinew of Coalition effort must proclaim the Taylor revolution for it to have any chance.

Given how cynical voters are about mainstream politicians, if the Coalition doesn’t follow through, voters will conclude that once more it’s not serious. …

Losing by copying the UK:

Australia is drifting into very dangerous 1970s-style stagnation. The US is leaving us in its dust on per capita living standards and productivity. Our economy is growing weaker and narrower.

Loser’s tax:

Australia’s tax arrangements are monumentally uncompetitive.

Consider four tax realities.

1. Our top marginal income tax rate of 47 per cent is one of the highest in the world. The US and Canada have top rates in the 30s (even with state taxes, lower overall rates than Australia). Most ­European nations have lower top rates than ours.

2. Our top rate cuts in at an absurdly low salary level, $190,000. In 2007, the top rate cut in at $180,000. This inertia is insane. In the US, the top rate cuts in at well over $US600,000, nearly $1m. In Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, the top rate cuts in at more than €270,000, which is well over $400,000.

3. Our corporate tax rate, of 30 per cent for sizeable companies, is one of the highest in the developed world.

4. Our tax on capital gains is now one of the highest in the world. Hardly a country taxes capital gains at the same rate as salary income. Capital gain involves greater risk and economies need capital formation. Some, such as Singapore and New Zealand, don’t tax capital gains at all.

Australia’s tax regime is neither internationally competitive nor pro-growth. …

Dr Jim Chalmers:

Only two Labor treasurers have had PhDs — Jim Cairns [Whitlam’s treasurer] and Jim Chalmers. Neither was in economics. They studied instead Labor history. Like all true tribalists they suffered acute sub-cultural myopia. They didn’t know the world, they knew Labor lore and legend. …

Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison:

The Liberals’ dismal nine years in office is evident in one detail. The top marginal tax rate — now recognised as grossly too high by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, among countless others — was unchanged in that whole time.

We’re going to get poorer before any improvements. Of course, if mass immigration continues, we will never recover.

Dave Hughes issues rips into the PM with brutal spray. By Kylie Stephens at The Daily Mail.

Aussie comedian Dave Hughes has called on Anthony Albanese to call an election two years early unless the federal government scraps its major tax reforms.

The Prime Minister and Treasurer Jim Chalmers have come under heavy fire in recent weeks over claims they broke election promises by restricting negative gearing to new investment properties and introducing a minimum 30 per cent capital gains tax (CGT). …

Hughes took to social media to slam the government in a furious spray while detailing a conversation he had just had with a business owner in Brisbane about the Federal Budget.

‘The capital gains tax has killed him. He’s got a 100 staff and doesn’t know what he’s going to do as he has no motivation anymore,’ Hughes began. …

Hughes said that he would never have voted for the Albanese government had he known the CGT discounts would be axed within a year.

 

 

‘I voted for Albo and Chalmers. They did not have a mandate for changing CGT,’ he said.

‘It’s now the highest in the world. No one is going to want to invest in Australia.

‘What the f*** are you doing?’

‘This affects every working Australian, and everyone who actually pays tax.

‘And you’ve just doubled the take on it to waste, because you’re f***king incompetent.’ …

‘You didn’t have a mandate for it. You lied blatantly, so it’s not valid.’

At least John Howard called an election before he implemented the GST. We had the opportunity to vote it down.

Albo has lost John Hughes. How many others? The tax changes could spell the end for this Labor Government.

Foolish Albanese doesn’t understand the pricing of risk, so we all lose. By Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian.

This country was built on the back of risk-takers. From explorers like James Cook and Matthew Flinders to military men like John Monash, the risk-takers have left a mark for the better on this country.

Australia has flourished from farmers taking risks on the land, and migrants boarding ships to a country they knew little about. In business, too, the risk-takers have transformed Australia, from miners like Lang Hancock to media titans such as Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer.

The risk-takers aren’t all big names. The country has 2.5 million small businesses, meaning an even larger number of Australians are taking risks every day. …

The Labor Party people who made this budget have no clue about business risk:

The Prime Minister is a former Labor Party official and research officer. Though the federal Treasurer has put Dr in front of this name, this has not added gravitas to his skill set. His CV, before taking charge of the Australian economy, was political adviser, academic researcher and chief-of-staff to Wayne Swan.

The Finance Minister was a community housing worker and ACT political staffer. The Foreign Minister was a union lawyer, industrial officer, and policy adviser. The Defence Minister was a lawyer at ALP-aligned law firm Slater & Gordon and a union official. The Immigration Minister was a union organiser and industrial officer. The Education Minister was a policy adviser and political staffer.

In other words, no risk-takers there. No one with any clue about the pressures of being responsible for a profit and loss account, navigating business red tape, signing contracts with suppliers and creditors, dealing with workplace rules that invite litigation.

With no hint on their CVs of any previous experience understanding what it’s like to run a business, no wonder the budget is bonkers. …

Ideology takes the place of experience:

One of the hoariest myths in the socialist lexicon is that it’s “fair” to tax income from labour just the same as income from capital. This has its roots in the kind of class warfare and ideology we all thought had disappeared when the Berlin Wall fell. We had all hoped that while Albanese may have felt safe in telling the 1991 ALP national conference in a debate on inheritance tax that “accumulated income in the form of capital is for all socialists at least part of the source of many social injustices”, he had learned a bit more about the real world since then.

Sadly, no. …

Income and capital are very different. They have different sources and drivers and it is decidedly unfair to tax them in the same way or at the same levels. …

Capital gains are uncertain and require the taking of risk. Employment income is generally predictable, certain and risk-free.

It’s like the difference between equity and debt — one is high risk but potentially high reward (or no reward) while the other offers certainty and thus no upside or downside. No economically literate person suggests the cost of debt should be the same as the cost of equity.

The Albanese-Chalmers taxation principle ignores human nature. Why would any sane person invest in a risky venture if the taxman treats you the same as if you invested in a risk-free venture? …

Without some incentive to take risk or to innovate by investing capital, new business growth dies, and the economy suffers. If you doubt this, talk to some of the venture capitalists and start-up entrepreneurs who are dismayed by the budget changes to capital gains tax.

 

Money will walk (By Brad Thomson in The Australian.)

Gina Rinehart says the Albanese government’s capital gains tax changes will ultimately hurt the federal budget bottom line as mining and other business investment moves offshore.

Mrs Rinehart said the tax changes were ill considered and left wage earners facing a double whammy if they chose to invest in mining to boost their wealth in what was already one of the highest taxing jurisdictions in the world. …

“These CGT changes will make it even harder for junior and medium explorers to raise the money needed to search for and develop new projects,” she told The Australian.

“Smaller and medium mining companies rely heavily on investors willing to back high-risk exploration years before there is any return. If you reduce the incentive and ability for people to invest, you reduce future discoveries, future mines, future jobs, future revenue and future growth for Australia at a time when our country sure needs it.

“Additionally, what is also being missed in the CGT increase is that people are investing money they have already paid tax on through PAYG and other taxes, and yet any profits they make on that reinvestment is now going to be subject to even higher taxes.”

Most financial scams work by mispricing risk. A high-risk product is sold as lower risk than it really is, thereby apparently justifying a higher price. The mark doesn’t know or can’t assess the risk accurately.

Albanese’s tax changes ignore risk almost completely, treating employees and investors the same. At one fell swoop, all investment activity has been penalized and all risks have been adversely repriced. Where it can, much of that money will now leave Australia. The outlook 20 years ahead is poor.