Regulators versus Builders

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’

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

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

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.

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

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

Merry Old England has a new Mayor.

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

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

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

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.

 


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

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.

Thesis: Women are not fit for leadership

Thesis: Women are not fit for leadership. By The Doge Patriarch.

The usual warning about generalizations, statistics, and exceptions apply throughout what follows.

We are still cavemen. Genetics change very slowly. Our brains and bodies have only just begun to process the change of the agricultural revolution, not to mention the internet and iPhones, which two generations ago were science fiction. …

 

We are different from them only in circumstance.

 

For women, 100% of their female ancestors were mothers. To suggest that the female brain is not optimized for motherhood is biological denialism. … Generation after generation molded women’s brains for this purpose and this purpose above all else. The greatest female warriors, leaders, explorers, etc. would have all been out-competed by the woman who simply had children and ensured their survival above all else. …

Unlike men who abandon their offspring, women who abandon their offspring disappear from the genetic record because a baby that’s never breastfed is a dead baby. …

We are not more than our biology. We are products of our biology. To ignore how evolution has shaped our brains is a societal attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. …

The thesis:

With all of these selection pressures molding women’s brains, there are places where this is advantageous and where it is not. By arguing that women are not fit for leadership, I am also arguing that men are not fit for daycare. …

Teamwork:

Large groups of men generally cooperate better than women. Because men underwent more selection pressure for cooperation.

On a mammoth hunt, if you disregard your place in the hierarchy, you can die. The military is essentially the modern version of the mammoth hunt. A man knows his rank in the hierarchy, and will charge at the enemy when told. When victory is won, it shall be his too.

Women on the other hand did not experience this pressure as severely. A woman who completely disregards her position in the hierarchy does not get the whole tribe killed. That is why mixed-sex armies and units consistently perform worse than all-male units. …

The power games women play are usually bloodless. Thus, women will fight constant skirmishes with each other.

All-male companies work. We know this. Why don’t all-female companies operate efficiently?

Male politics — play the ball, not the man:

Male leaders and male-dominated political philosophies generally criticize ideas in detail, not individuals.

Karl Marx was an unemployed bum who crashed on his successful friend’s couch for long periods of his life, and was estranged from his family because he constantly asked them for money.

However, you probably didn’t know that. Because when men debate Marxism, it’s about the bad ideas, not the man himself.

In male politics there is an underlying assumption that we should “separate art from the artist”. Because great ideas can sometimes come from really strange people.

Female politics — so woke:

This is dramatically contrasted by female dominated politics, where the speaker is far more important than the idea. When women attack each other, they attempt to undermine the speaker’s credibility rather than the ideas the speaker is espousing.

You see this in comments sections all over the internet. Many times this boils down to name-calling. “Virgin” “Nazi” “Whore” “Incel”, etc. …

The important distinction is they are not criticizing what was said, instead they criticize who said it. Feminized men do this too.

As another example, just look at how Bluesky talks about Trump. It’s never about policies that have logical holes like Swiss cheese, It’s always about how orange he is. Or the size of his hands.

Women will also bully a consensus out of each other rather than refine ideas through debate. When a consensus is reached though bullying tactics, it is defended rigorously regardless if the consensus is correct or has outlived its usefulness. …

Even worse, it shifts from “You can’t say that!” to “You must say this!” quite easily. This phenomenon is seen on the political left almost exclusively. … The singer Ed Sheeran got in hot water with the ‘free Palestine’ people for firing a supporting musical act for shouting “free Palestine”. Note, he did not say anything against the artist, he simply said he didn’t want his tour to be political. … And interestingly enough,… Ed Sheeran caved to the mob. Not all men are fit for leadership after all.

The reason for this behavior is evolutionary psychology. Social isolation is dangerous, especially for women. Being a single mother with no support structure was a death sentence for 99.99% of human history. If a woman held an unpopular opinion and was ejected from the tribe for it, it’s very unlikely she would survive. And if she did survive, she would be picked up by another tribe and then placed at the bottom of that tribe’s hierarchy.

Women will say a slogan they don’t agree with so they don’t become socially isolated. It’s survival.

Standing up against a mob telling you: “Say FUCK ICE!” Is scary, and lots of men cave to the pressure too. How many people caved to the pressure during 2020 and said: “Black lives matter”?  …

Fortunately, there are many exceptions

A leader is someone who won’t cave. Have you ever met someone who can stand in the face of a mob and tell them that they’re all wrong? If so, they were probably a man. …

A leader must be disagreeable. A leader must be the kind of person who will stand their ground and refuse to be pushed around. …

Agreeableness under pressure:

Women have always been physically weaker than men, this shouldn’t be controversial. But what effect did this have on the female brain? Surely the women who went around picking fights with men either learned their lesson very quickly, or died.

Over many generations, this results in women who are keen at detecting threats to their personal safety and favor a non-violent conflict resolution. …

If two young women are kidnapped by another tribe, one fights back as hard as she can, while the other gives in, which one passes her genes on?

Evolution does not care about consent. The women that submitted in the face of danger survived, while the ones that fought back did not. This resulted in a female brain that will seek safety even if it is unjust. …

Stockholm syndrome, where the kidnapping victim falls in love with the kidnapper, is another application of this safety instinct. For 99.99% of human history, if a woman was kidnapped, nobody was coming for her because the tribe had been wiped out. The safest option for her was to fall in love with your kidnapper and have his babies. We’re all decedent from the men and women who did this. The human prehistoric past was unfettered barbarism. …

Lefty lies about matriarchy:

There is a claim in progressive archeology circles: that human beings were matriarchal before recorded history.

In my opinion, it’s quite easy to debunk. What would a woman leader of a tribe do if a man didn’t want to obey her? Exactly.

They make this claim because it is before recorded history so they can bury the lie in our general ignorance of the time. And then, once agriculture started and history started to be recorded, everywhere is suddenly patriarchal!

I don’t think they fully understand that they are implying that once societies tried patriarchy, they became more successful. Because it’s impossible to not come to that conclusion if all of prehistory was matriarchal. Once we stopped being matriarchal, we started building cities!

Of course this is not true. Female leadership has never existed on any large scale throughout human history. Wherever it was tried, it failed. …

From China to Rome, Persia to Ethiopia. Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Roman pagans. They all came to the same conclusion despite having no contact with each other, and this conclusion stuck for thousands of years. …

The EU? Collapsing economy and an uncontrolled third world invasion.

Raising children, social connections, homemaking. These are all women’s domains. And throughout history men have respected women’s authority WITHIN these domains.

Raising armies, managing empires, responding to threats. These are all men’s domains. And throughout history women have respected men’s authority WITHIN these domains.

There was a viral trend about a year ago of women asking men how often they think of the Roman empire. The women were always floored by how often, because they never think about the Roman empire at all! Yes, that’s because we are different. Babies, gossip, and relationships. Those are what you’re designed for. While empire building, conquest, and war is what I am built for. …

Male exceptionalism:

There is a concept in evolutionary biology called male exceptionalism. To put it simply, evolution uses men as experiments. While for women, it plays safe.

IQ intelligence male female

The distribution of g (raw intelligence) in male and female populations. The scale of the horizontal axis is in units of the male standard deviation. Only 37% of humans with IQs over 120 (the bottom of managerial level) are female. As the threshold IQ moves up, the male-female gap only grows larger. Blame God.

 

The reasons for this are simple. Men are a gamble. We can father 1000 children, or 0. If nature plays it safe with a man, there’s not much to gain. While if your genes hit the jackpot and create a gigachad genius that fathers the whole next generation, massive success! [Genghis Khan, Elon Musk]

Women obviously cannot father the next generation. They can only have a limited number of children in their lives. Evolutionary speaking, there’s no reason to gamble with women’s brains.

This doesn’t mean that men are simply better, it means that men are over represented at both ends of the great/terrible spectrum. …

Political leadership today:

Pushing your nation or political party to be artificially selecting women as leaders will lead to ruinous results.

 

Naturally, the political right should respond to the popularity of female leadership on the left by doing the opposite. Male leadership. Debates, ideas, hierarchy and cooperation.

However, I sincerely doubt the modern controlled opposition Republican party will manage to not fumble this. And instead they will attempt to out-feminism the other side and we’ll end up with president Tulsi Gabbard.

Throughout the West for the last few decades, women have been systematically promoted to higher positions at the expense of males, because they were women. We now have many women in leadership positions, in politics, bureaucracy, academia, and the corporate world.

Has the quality of leadership, the quality of public debate, and the effectiveness of our ruling class gone up, stayed about the same, or gone down in the last few decades?

Pauline Hanson at CPAC

Pauline Hanson at CPAC. By Cloe Maher in The West Australian.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane on Saturday, she called Opposition leader Angus Taylor a “smarmy management consultant,” then went after net-zero:

“The uni-party has taken their turns running this country into the ground,” Hanson told the conference, according to The Australian.

“Both must take accountability.”

She also unveiled plans for a royal commission into net zero emissions targets if One Nation formed government, promising to expose what she described as corruption “swindle” at the heart of the nation’s climate policies.

Pointing to the Liberal’s Paris Agreement and emissions reduction targets, Senator Hanson argued the party could not be trusted to reverse net-zero policies. …

“The Liberals signed us up to the Paris Agreement and net zero…and they have opted the targets into law and made them even worse. So why would we trust them to get us out of it?”  …

Putting aside past grievances to defeat Labor:

“I know what it means to put personal history aside and turn the other cheek. The Liberal Party threw me out and then threw me in jail,” she said.

“I do have reasons to hold a grudge but I also have children and grandchildren. Their future matters more. If I can put personal grievances aside others can do the same. …

“Some of you are thinking about closing the business, some thinking about taking the skills overseas, and some are giving up on this country. Please don’t.”

 

From serving fish and chips in her shop, in 1987

Islamic group dobs in John Cleese as a “terrorist”

Islamic group dobs in John Cleese as a “terrorist”. By Andrew Doyle.

John Cleese has been reported to Prevent, the UK government programme designed to stop people from becoming terrorists …

The complaint against Cleese was made by a member of the public, and the details passed to 5Pillars, an Islamist media outlet based in London. … 5Pillars has ‘expressed support for an Islamic caliphate, Sharia (Islamic principles and law) penal codes and physical jihad’ and ‘repeatedly abused and intimidated Muslim liberals, counter-extremists, and human rights activists’. ….

In its report, 5Pillars repeated the complainant’s claim that Cleese’s jokes and comments ‘go beyond legitimate criticism of Islam and instead portray Muslims collectively as violent, criminal and morally depraved’. …

 

Five pillars promoting the new film, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, starring two-time Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali. The future?

 

The complainant to Prevent specifically cited one post that read: ‘I personally prefer a culture that does not approve of FGM, child marriage and killing infidels’. Is that really all that controversial? …

Cleese rightly rejects the nonsense term ‘Islamophobic’ and instead calls himself ‘Islamosceptic’. How could he be otherwise? This is a man who has brilliantly skewered closed systems of thought for many decades. Most of us will remember the Pythons’ televised debate with Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop Mervyn Stockwood following the release of Life of Brian in 1979. Just imagine the conniptions if the offended party were a representative from 5Pillars. The priggish outrage of Muggeridge and Stockwood would pale by comparison. …

Cleese has responded in the best possible way: by mocking it. He has said of the report to Prevent: ‘One of the proudest moments of my life. I would like to thank everyone concerned’. In another post he wrote: ‘I look forward to being arrested’. The tyrannical mindset — always humourless — cannot bear to be ridiculed. Few will be surprised that there are those who wish to see Cleese silenced, and that they will try to weaponise the law to that end. …

Guess who’s side the UK Government is on?

The government has, of course, fallen in line with the woke orthodoxy. An official UK counter-terrorism website lists ‘cultural nationalism’ as one of the ideological strands associated with ‘extreme right-wing terrorism’. … This is the gloss it provides to the phrase ‘cultural nationalism’:

“A belief that “Western Culture” is under threat from mass migration into Europe and from a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups. The ideology tends to focus on the rejection of cultural practices such as the wearing of the burqa, or the perceived rise of the use of sharia law. In the UK this has been closely associated with anti-Islam groups.”

Imagine a future with woke governments and an ever increasing Islamic population in the UK. You’d have to ask an Imam before speaking. Or joking. No more like this:

The past?

The UK has to choose: Cleese or 5Pillars. They are clearly not compatible.