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. 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.

 

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. 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”. 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.

 

Number of teens who identify as gay or bisexual is in ‘free fall’. By Casey Parks at The Washington Post.

In 2021, 30 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as lesbian or bisexual. Last year, 17 percent did. …

A few years ago, after the pandemic shutdowns, the CDC data showed big upticks in the percentage of high school girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual. …

The rate of boys who identify as gay or bisexual has remained roughly the same over the past decade.

The fad is over. Bisexuality and lesbianism was just a fad among young girls at school, egged on by political indoctrination/wokeness. Girls are more prone to trends, and their sexuality is more fluid, and they fell for it hard. Boys were less affected. Trans, too, is dying down.

The most fundamental divide in politics. By Richard Miniter.

Well, I’m going to sound a little bit like a Marxist here because only Marxists talk about class theory in an intelligent way. But the devil can sometimes tell the truth, right?

There are two classes that are dividing our society. … One is the unaccountable class. And these are people whose pay is not tied to results. It doesn’t affect them if the economy grows at 1% or 3%. No change in the real world affects them in a professional way.

Then there’s the accountable class, and these are people who live on results. If you fail to save too many patients as an emergency room surgeon, you’re shown the door. If you are a shoe salesman and you don’t sell any shoes, there’s the door, right? If you don’t turn up for work, uh, laying bricks, there’s the door. …

At every strata of our society, at every income level, at every education level, there are accountable and unaccountable people. But that’s the real divide, right? Jeff Bezos is a very wealthy man, but he’s highly accountable to shareholders. … It’s easier to show in a working class environment because it’s very clear if you don’t turn up for work, they just don’t pay you, right? People who will be punished by the market if they drift from the truth or drift from reality, and don’t provide value for other people. …

It affects everything about how you see the world:

Capitalism is essentially solving other people’s problems in exchange for money.. … If you’re out there curing the sick, or educating the young, or you’re winning a gold medal in the Olympics, or you’re writing software code, whatever you’re doing — if you’re paid by the performance of that, you’re on some deep level accountable.

And it changes who you are as a person and it changes what you do as a person. And from a political cultural sense, it changes how you think about the world. Your idea of justice, your idea of freedom, your idea of right and wrong.

The unaccountable class has conquered society since the 1930s, and it lives on the left:

But then there’s this large unaccountable class and these are people who live in a insulated, almost isolated world. These are people who might be in the bowels of bureaucracy of some big company. They might be trade union leaders who haven’t faced a competitive election in decades. And of course this is the tenured professors, the civil servants.

It doesn’t matter how quickly they move, whether they do anything at all. They get paid for showing up. …

During the run-up to the Iraq war, when I was talking to a lot to then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s staff, the generals were opposed to the Iraq war and I talked to them one-on-one. I asked why — I mean this must be your chance to show what you can really do. They … made a careerist argument. They said, listen Richard the problem with going to war as a general is that some people who have certain tactics, certain strategies, certain methods, are proven right and other people … are proven wrong. It’s bad for their careers, safer not to go to war at all, and then no one really knows who’s right and who’s wrong and we can just coast to retirement. …

Everything that you and the people who watch you don’t like about the world can be traced one way or another to the guiding hand of the unaccountable class. …

The fundamental political choice:

I wish it could say it’s, you know, individual versus the collective, or freedom versus slavery ,or one of those things you learn in philosophy class, but it’s not that. It’s fundamentally do you change yourself or do you change the world? Do you say I’m unhappy and therefore I need to change, I need to adapt to the reality beyond me. Or — I’m perfect, I need the world to change and accept me. …

The the body positivity is a classic case of this. The world needs to change what it finds attractive rather than you need to change.

So the political implications and the cultural implications for this are quite large because the people who think that they don’t need to change and they want the world to change to make them feel better about themselves. These people overwhelmingly gravitate toward the unaccountable class because they do not want to be shaped right by the outside world.

 

 

Sagal Abdi Wali just won Kier Starmer’s former seat in the UK Parliament. Via End Wokeness.

UK by-election. Wali is the woman in the middle with the hijab.

Immigration policies have consequences.

A “testament to diversity,” says the left-wing Independent.

The French Intifada. By the editorial team at The Australian.

[What began as student] protests, as British writer Brendan O’Neill reported in the New York Post on Wednesday, may be attracting hundreds of thousands on to the streets across France, but they are increasingly being “morphed into an orgy of Islamo-leftist violence”.

O’Neill says we are witnessing something extraordinary: an intifada in the heart of Europe.

“Surely no one can now deny the lethal error of throwing open a nation’s borders to the world, while sacrificing the ideals of integration at the altar of multiculturalism,” he said. …

Donald Trump was widely criticised on Tuesday when he warned that the French student riots were the inevitable result of “out of control mass migration … this isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great country”, he wrote on his Truth Social website.

Mr Trump has a point. There is far more to the student riots than the condition of French classrooms.

Brave AI on the meaning of Intifada:

Intifada is an Arabic term meaning “uprising” or “shaking off,” derived from a verb meaning to shake off dust or lethargy.

In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, it refers to popular uprisings by Palestinians against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

While the word can describe various uprisings globally (such as the 1916 Easter Rising or the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), in English it primarily denotes these Palestinian resistance movements.

It’s been going on for a while:

But it’s made a big step up in the last week.

US vs Europe. One of them is being left in the dust. Two brilliant short videos:

Western civilization is worth defending. https://t.co/yuBiK1yIrD

— Department of State (@StateDept) October 8, 2026

 

I told Claude to make a video about what it’s like to be European

One day later… https://t.co/zBRP9n2TpT

— Moritz Kremb (@moritzkremb) October 5, 2026

Guess which path Australia is choosing.

via Joanne Nova

The Downfall of Tucker Carlson. By Stephen Green at PJ Media.

How many times does someone get to make excuses for Hitler before they get labeled “evil,” too?

Whatever that number is, I’m reasonably sure that Tucker Carlson just hit it.

Strike 3:

On a podcast late last week, Carlson interviewed former British Conservative Member of Parliament Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg to talk about the current sad state of Britain, and among other topics, how the British might be better off today if they’d just had the good sense to let the Nazis win World War II.

Strike 1:

This disturbing side of Carlson first came to my attention two years ago when he could be seen nodding along enthusiastically with the Palestinian Authority’s favorite Christian, Reverend Munther Isaac.

The Gaza War had been raging for just six months when Carlson chose to interview Isaac to find out how the Jewish State of Israel treats Christians. Isaac is a Palestinian Christian from Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem, where Christian ministers serve at the mercy of the Palestinian Authority. The PA has ethnically cleansed Bethlehem from 80% Christian 30 years ago to 80% Muslim today.

During his interview, Carlson failed to ask Isaac why he applauded the Oct. 7 atrocities — and that little omission was probably the best part of the podcast.

Strike 2:

Carlson’s new schtick came to my attention again later in 2024 when he happily hosted the musings of pseudo-historian Daryl “Oops!… He Holocausted Again” Cooper. According to Cooper, Nazi war atrocities and that little Holocaust business were just the Germans being merciful.

“We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people,” Cooper imagined the Germans thinking after fighting on the Eastern Front accidentally created more prisoners and refugees than Germany could cope with. “And one of them actually says, ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?’”

That’s an actual quote.

“Oopsies!” is not a valid excuse for the methodical execution (and sometimes torture) of six million Jews and another six million assorted “undesirables” like gays, Gypsies, cripples, and the mentally retarded. The Germans killed roughly 3.3 million Soviet POWs during the war, too, largely through forced labor and malign neglect — not by accident or out of mercy.

Yet Carlson endorsed him as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”

Carson was so good at analyzing US politics. But when he ventured to comment outside the US, his abysmal ignorance about the non-US world led to major faux pas and poor judgement — as above.

The elite of Victorian England were one unified family who played together but knew little. By Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress.

[Modern] books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ and on the ‘STEM’ quaternity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours.

Victorian Britain ruled the world like no one before or since, and their elites did it very differently:

The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.

Despite this, the elites of nineteenth-century Britain were, by their own lights, extremely successful. For much of the century, Britain was the richest country on Earth. Its companies dominated global commerce, industry and finance. Its huge navy reigned over the world’s oceans, and its tiny army won a long sequence of wars while keeping watch over an enormous empire. Britain progressed gradually toward democracy with none of the revolutions and civil wars that wracked continental Europe. There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well. Huel, STEM, and cold baths have their merits. But the example of the Victorians should make us hesitate before concluding that there is only one way to rule the world.

 

The British elite were one big unified family, strong on team building and soft skills, and rather poor at acquiring knowledge about anything other than themselves.

Schools:

Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. …

Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. … Victorian adults had little occasion to use their classical languages, so they tended to forget them. ‘I have gladly forgotten all my Latin, and don’t ever want to remember it again’, wrote the war poet Charles Sorley, one year after leaving school; at least he did better than Winston Churchill, who remarked that ‘In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet’. …

School authorities introduced programs of organized sports, chiefly cricket in summer and various forms of ‘football’ (including what became rugby) in winter. Many schools ultimately had four, five, or even six afternoons of sports per week: a student would certainly spend ten hours a week on the sports field, and might well spend twenty.

The Victorians thought extremely highly of sports, believing that they instilled team spirit and endurance, fostered mutual loyalty, channeled energy and competitiveness, and taught men how to win and lose graciously. …

Most elite Victorian men went on to Oxford or Cambridge (‘Oxbridge’). Oxbridge was not necessarily a big step up academically. Virtually everyone who applied was accepted. Once you were in, you could pursue one of two tracks: either an ‘honors’ degree, which involved at least some serious study, or a ‘pass’ or ‘ordinary’ degree, which involved sitting only some very easy exams in classics and religion. In the early Victorian period, most Oxbridge students were ‘pass men’; this changed gradually as the century drew on, but there were still plenty of pass men around as late as 1914. The pass degree was particularly popular among aristocratic students, who tended to prioritize rowing, feasting, and social polish over disciplined study. …

Nearly all students lived together in colleges.

Adulthood:

One virtue that upper-class Victorian education signally failed to inculcate was early rising. … The day of an upper-class Victorian adult started late. The great prime minister of the early nineteenth century, Pitt the Younger, breakfasted at 9am. The great prime minister of the Victorian period, William Gladstone, hosted a social breakfast starting at 10.30am (claret was served), continuing till about noon. His rival Benjamin Disraeli attended breakfasts hosted by Lord Houghton, which started at 10am, but which Disraeli would join at about 11.30am. Elite Victorians generally had flexible working hours and were free to work from home unless they had meetings elsewhere. Many spent the whole morning at home, reading the newspaper, answering letters, and preparing for later meetings. The Edwardian prime minister Arthur Balfour generally did all this literally in bed, rarely emerging from his bedroom before lunchtime. As we shall see, mornings must often have been even later from February to July, when many leading Victorians would have spent much of the night partying.

At some point in the late morning, the Victorian would finally make his way to the office. … Britain’s elites were slow to suburbanize, and in 1914 most still lived in centrally located row houses and walked to work.  …

Dinners were rich and elaborate. … A typical dinner began with soup and sherry, then proceeded to fish with hock (Rhineland whites), passing on through a sequence of meat courses with champagne or red wines, and finishing with various desserts and savories served with port and madeira. The Victorians loved drinking and drank a lot by modern standards. Men drank more than women, but women drank a good deal too: one conduct guide noted that ‘young ladies seldom drink more than three glasses of wine at dinner but married ladies, professional ladies, and those accustomed to society, and habits of affluence, will habitually take five or even six, whether in their own homes or at the tables of their friends’. …

Balls were the flagship evening entertainment. They started late, at nine or ten, and guests would filter in gradually, with the dance floor really full from about 11pm. Around midnight a meal called ‘supper’ appeared, comprising soups, salads, cold meats, shellfish, fruit, and ice cream. After supper, dancing recommenced; a good ball peaked after 1am. Guests gradually returned home in the small hours, and the most determined might continue until dawn. …

 

It would be quite wrong, however, to think that balls were simply mass dating events. Courtiers, bankers, judges, and cabinet ministers would have shared the dance floor with debutantes. In fact, with some exceptions like club lunches, the social events of the Victorian elite were notable for their lack of segregation by age or sex. A Society ball discharged the functions of both a teenage house party and a business networking convention: in fact, it was both a teenage house party and a business networking convention. …

Working hardly at all, or all the time?

By one definition, then, elite Victorians did remarkably little work: they could easily spend just four or five hours a day actually in the office. But by another definition, they were working all the time. Lunches, balls, and dinners were certainly fun, but they were not just fun. In the words of the historian Leonore Davidoff, these social occasions provided ‘access to a vast information network: information about jobs, investment possibilities, secret political decisions’. Many Victorians were intensely ambitious and drove themselves hard: sleep deprivation, exhaustion and burnout were familiar companions.

The distinctive feature of elite Victorian lifestyles was not laziness, but an extreme weighting toward what we might call team building and professional networking, and the near-total fusion of personal and professional life….

Why it succeeded:

It is not altogether fanciful to think of the Victorian elite as functioning like a big premodern village, though its members were geographically dispersed across the kingdom and its vast empire.

All the practices I have described in this article helped to maintain this emotional village. The ruling class were educated together from an early age, in schools and universities designed to inculcate shared values, a common identity, and ties of mutual loyalty. As adults they congregated every year in an area of central London that actually was village-sized, where they spent every night in one another’s company. Young members of the Victorian elite tended to meet their future spouses during these glittering evenings, so that the elite came to form, to some extent, a literal family. …

The advantage was unity — no rivalry among elites:

In some ways, rich Victorians were quite diverse. They came from every part of the British Isles. They included landed aristocrats and urban bourgeois, with the latter steadily superseding the former over the course of the century. Most landowners were Anglicans, but many of the new rich were Nonconformists (non-Anglican Protestants), and some were Jews or Catholics. With the conspicuous exception of the Irish Catholics, all these people were successfully folded into a single British elite, rather than forming hostile counter-elites working to overthrow the social order.

This obviously had advantages for Britain. The elites of the American South had a very different identity to those of the North, and ultimately led the country into civil war. Spain, Italy and France suffered from incessant conflicts between urban bourgeois and rural nobility. Germany was riven with strife along geographical, religious, and class lines. Some of these tensions existed in Britain, but except in Ireland, the elite finessed them peacefully. …

What if we were more like that today?

Would modern societies work better if their local and national government were conducted by a tight-knit community of extremely rich and successful people? Maybe not: the downsides are obvious.

But the problems would be interestingly different from those that they have in reality. Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

The limits of socialism and the crazy government supermarket poposals. By Handre.

Boris Yeltsin walked into a Houston Randall’s grocery store in 1989 and went quiet. Not quiet in a polite, diplomatic way. Quiet in the way a man goes quiet when reality collapses on him.

He saw 30,000 products on shelves. He saw ordinary Americans buying chicken, cheese, and fresh bread without a ration card, without a two-hour queue, without bribing anyone. A Soviet man of real power, surrounded by abundance that Soviet central planners had promised for seventy years and never delivered. He reportedly told his aide that if ordinary Soviet citizens saw this store, they would riot.

 

 

Central planners destroyed the price system. Without prices, nobody could calculate where to send resources. Hayek proved this theoretically in 1945. The Soviets proved it empirically with empty shelves every single decade they existed.

You grew up in that system, and you got potatoes when the state decided potatoes existed for you. You stood in line for meat that had already rotted. You traded favors to get medicine your doctor prescribed. Bureaucrats in Moscow set production quotas with no feedback mechanism, no profit signal, no way to know what you actually needed.

Yeltsin left that Houston store and reportedly wept in the car. He later said it destroyed his belief in the Soviet system more than any dissident literature ever had.

Socialism grinds people down daily, in a thousand small humiliations, until standing in line for bread feels normal.

Some things the free market does  much, much better than socialism. On the other hand, socialism (i.e. government) is naturally better for armies and courts. And it’s usually appropriate for natural monopolies, like water and roads. For money and interest rates? Hmmmm, maybe not, in the long run. But supermarkets? Definitely not.

In New York, Mayor Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has allocated $70m in the city budget to open five grocery stores. He said they will offer produce, meat and seafood for 30% less than typical retail prices.

In Australia, the Green Institute, the research arm of the Australian Greens, is urging federal government to spend $25.1 billion creating a publicly owned supermarket network and forcibly acquiring more than 200 Coles and Woolworths stores. It claims the government-owned stores could cut the cost of essential groceries by 30 per cent and save a family of four more than $3,000 a year.

Why 30% in both cases? Probably because they see these figures for public companies, and think they can run a chain of stores as well and give away all the “profit”:

Supermarket	Gross margin	Equivalent mark-up
Woolworths (Australia, FY2025)	28.6%	40.1%
Coles (FY2026)	27.8%	38.5%
Kroger (FY2025)	22.9%	29.7%
Walmart (FY2025)	24.1%	31.8%
Albertsons (recent quarterly result)	27.2%	37.4%

Source: Annual reports, via ChatGPT.

Technical details (which socialists and politicians tend to skip): Suppose a supermarket buys a product for $7 and sells it for $10.

• Its mark-up is 42.9% (the extra $3 divided by $7).
• Its gross margin is 30% (the extra $3 divided by $10).
• Its net profit is much smaller after wages, rent, electricity, refrigeration, distribution and other expenses. The net profit margins of major Australian and American supermarkets are generally around 1–3% of sales (due to stiff competition), far smaller than their gross margins of approximately 23–29%.

Supermarket	Net profit margin	Financial year
Australia
Coles	~2.4%	FY2026
Woolworths	1.4% reported / 2.0% underlying	FY2025
United States
Kroger	0.7% reported / 2.2% adjusted	FY2025
Walmart	~3%	FY2026
Albertsons	~0.3% reported	FY2025

So 30% is way too optimistic without major, major subsidies. Mamdani and the Australian Greens will end up quietly weeping in their cars if they go ahead. Yes, they really are that dumb about economics and business.

What if your ‘lived experience’ is attending a mosque five times a day? By The Spectator Australia.

The left loves to fetishise so-called ‘lived experiences’. The idea is that there is something unique that ‘normal’ people can never comprehend if you have the ‘lived experience’ of being, for instance, gay, or transgender, black or whatever.

But the opposite is never considered: what if your ‘lived experience’ is attending a mosque five times a day in Mogadishu and having it drummed into you since birth that certain other people are vermin who deserve to die? How healthy is it for a society to import large numbers of people who may have been immersed in such a ‘lived experience’? And why do we imagine that just because our ‘lived experience’ is one of tolerating other lifestyles, the same holds true for everyone else? At what point is social cohesion severely damaged if those we allow to come to our shores have no desire to be ‘socially cohesive’ themselves?

These issues have been worsened by the refusal of the Albanese government to admit, let alone to confront, them. On what planet, in a post-October 7 world, would you think it a great idea to suddenly grant over 3,000 visas to Gazans? …

To what extent do we allow these alien beliefs and discriminatory practices to enter our free and open society? And what to do when it dawns on us that we might have already let in too many? …

No matter how much the left-wing media here and abroad attempt to disguise the reality of the nightmare in France, and indeed in much of Europe, the public have already made up their minds. Islamic values are too often incompatible with Western democratic norms.

Gaza: the most lied about war in history, and the left’s blood libel. By Brendan O’Neil in spiked.

What would you call a country that is experiencing one of the highest levels of population growth on Earth? How would you describe a country where the child malnutrition levels are similar to those of that industrial powerhouse of Europe, Germany? What would you say about a nation that was in receipt of so much food aid that at one stage around 3,163 calories were available per person, per day? I’ll tell you what you couldn’t say: that that country is suffering one of the most demonic genocides in history. That its people are being forcibly starved. That its pain finds no parallel in the annals of human wickedness.

I am talking about Gaza. …

Three years since Hamas’s genocidal invasion of the Jewish State, the truth of the war that followed is starting to peep through the choking slurry of lies. If I were one of those people who spent the past three years blood-libelling the Jewish nation as a Nazi-like, child-starving murder machine, I’d start thinking up some excuses right about now. For history is coming for you. …

Gaza is the most lied about war in history. Nothing else comes close. The branding of a war as a ‘genocide’, and normal war suffering as ‘famine’, is a flagrant crime against truth. The branding of the Jews’ fightback against anti-Semitic barbarism as ‘genocidal mania’ is unforgivable….

To call the Jewish State a Nazi entity is the great, terrible lie of our times. It is a libel without compare. It is utterly without foundation. …

It’s actually quite simple. If you wanted to ‘genocide’ a people, would you send them tens of millions of meals and assist in the vaccination of a million of their children from polio? Israel did that in Gaza. It spearheaded the importing of millions of tonnes of food. It worked with the World Health Organisation to vaccinate more than a million Gazan kids. Not only is this ‘unlike’ what the Nazis did to the Jews — it’s the polar, stirring, complete opposite.

In Nazi Poland, over 97% of the Jews died. In Gaza, less than 3% of the population died. One’s a real genocide, the other a bunch of lies.