The Great Dumb-Down is here — the effect of the decline in literacy

The Great Dumb-Down is here — the effect of the decline in literacy. By Paul Sagar at UnHerd.

What appears to be in mass decline is the reading of complex, long-form prose. This is particularly obvious when it comes to reading books, where the statistics are stark. In America, reading for pleasure has declined by 40% in the past 20 years. In the UK, The National Literacy Trust reports that the number of children saying they read for pleasure is the lowest on record. But it is also a story about the loss of widespread reading in the form of daily newspapers. As well as the disappearance of local journalism, national publications have seen circulation drop from the millions to the low hundreds of thousands. The very fact that you are reading this means that you are now firmly in a minority of the population.

What has increasingly replaced both books and newspapers is screens — and specifically the screens we carry around in our pockets, upon which we watch short-form videos. This is the dawn of the post-literate society. People can read; it’s just that most of them choose not to.

Western Civilization was built on reading books:

OK, so what’s the problem? Let’s start with the fact that it is only through the written word that human beings can engage in long, complex, critically verifiable chains of thought. An oral culture can bequeath a story, but it cannot become The Odyssey until somebody writes it down. Even more dramatically, imagine someone trying to dictate from memory (let alone listen to, understand, and analyse) something like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

More than that, however, reading literally rewires our brains. [James Marriott, in The New Dark Ages,] marshals the relevant neuroscientists, and they are clear: the kind of complex cognition that our civilisation depends upon is possible only for humans who can read. Humans who can read more complex things are (on average) able to have more complex thoughts. Those who struggle to read complex things struggle to have complex thoughts.

 

 

Smartphones literally make people stupider:

This is why smartphones are nothing short of a civilisation-threatening disaster. What a smartphone removes is the need for reading anything complex, let alone long-form. Indeed, they are designed to do the opposite. Thousands of very smart engineers devote their entire careers to diverting as much of your attention as possible to short form videos, the scrolliest of scrollbait. When watching short videos delivering the dopamine hits to which we are now addicted, our brains are rewiring. This time, to make us stupider.

What about podcasts? There is some evidence that the precipitous decline in the sales of non-fiction books is partially due to the fact that we’re listening to more podcasts — at least some of which are highly intelligent. The problem is that doing so returns us to something like an oral culture; the inadequacies of oral culture are most apparent when you transcribe the kinds of things that people say on podcasts. …

Because our ears work differently from our eyes, we find oral testimony persuasive even when it is filled with glaring errors, inconsistencies, and even a basic lack of coherence. The collapse of reading correlates with the rise of conspiracy theories, flat-earthers, false beliefs about vaccines, and all the rest of the internet-enabled bullshit. …

Did the higher IQs of the 1800s cause literacy, or the other way around?

Mass literacy is a recent phenomenon, and by no means the historical norm. It only really got going in Western countries around the 18th century, and he persuasively makes the case that it is no accident that democracy arose in the 19th. It first required a print culture where everybody read a lot — and what they read was more cognitively demanding than what is more readily on offer today. We have reliable records of working-class children choosing to read Dickens, Defoe and Shakespeare in the Forties: in other words before television became ubiquitous. …

[Marriot] puts forward a plausible underlying explanation of what has driven, or at least exacerbated, so many of the problems we now face: “the literate foundations on which liberal democracy rests are crumbling beneath our feet”. The fact that he must make this case in a book is a vicious, if fitting, irony.

Technology drives politics:

Throughout human history, whenever underlying technologies have changed, the politics have changed. Reading is a case in point. The invention of the Gutenberg press eventually made Western democracy possible through the rise of literate populations. Along the way, it also helped undermine absolute monarchies, as well as unleashing the European wars of religion, resulting in millions of deaths. …

Today:

I came away not optimistic, but convinced that we are now hurtling firmly downwards.

I recently spent a Saturday afternoon compiling reports on the students who seem to have submitted pure AI copy-and-paste for their resits. … I’m doing this because I’m mad and actually think that education and scholarship matter. The incentives strongly suggest to me that I should just pretend I haven’t noticed, and enjoy my Saturday. (The students are also under perverse incentives; if you don’t cheat but the others do, aren’t you just the mug?) … Until we find a way to sort this out, university degrees really are going to be pretty much worthless.

If you stand at the back of a lecture hall these days, you see a sea of screens, students flicking through their dopamine suppliers. At the front, some relic from a previous generation drones on. A couple of times a week, the relic is me.

How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair

How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair. By Nathan Confas in The WSJ.

I have been smeared as a racist and threatened with violence. My university suspended me. All I did was tell the truth. …

Speaker after speaker at the vigil held for Arday in Trafalgar Square on Monday denounced me by name, including a prominent politician. Many have claimed that I fabricated the evidence against Arday, although this is easily refuted. …

I’m an easy scapegoat because I hold views about race that are controversial and easily misunderstood. I argue that differences between ancestral populations aren’t entirely due to environmental forces, and that some group disparities stem from natural differences for which no one is to blame.

I made a widely quoted statement: “Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students.” That sentence has been cited repeatedly as evidence that I’m a racist.

Few people are aware that my statement about Harvard admissions was summarizing a finding by Harvard itself. In the course of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, Harvard disclosed an internal study conducted in 2013, which found that, if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, the undergraduate population would be 0.7% African-American — a significant reduction from current levels. Racial representation at many American institutions is maintained by Harvard-style affirmative action.

I didn’t quote Harvard’s statistic to celebrate it, or because I believe that black people don’t belong at universities. There are many brilliant black scholars. But it’s a difficult fact to face that in a truly colorblind system that didn’t take race into account, there would be a shocking lack of diversity in certain institutions. As I said in the controversial essay that mentions the Harvard statistic, “when it comes to policymaking in a multiracial society, we might need to make sure that everyone feels they have a voice in determining our collective fate.” To this end, I argued for taking measures to ensure meaningful representation of major demographic groups. But we shouldn’t do this under the banner of DEI, which automatically blames differences in outcome on white racism. …

The lesson can’t be that it’s unacceptable to point out wrongdoing that implicates powerful public figures. That’s what I did when I exposed fraud and institutional corruption at Cambridge.

Now, for self-interested reasons, there’s another case of corruption that I object to: the scapegoating of a whistleblower by powerful institutions that refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions.

Truth is the highest value of Western Civilization, you dinosaur. Get with it! Nowadays it’s all about identity politics — my tribe right or wrong — especially when it comes to divvying up the tax take. It’s a leftist institutional world now, with a third world and Islamist takeover in the wings.

Nathan Confas is Jewish — an oppressor! The new lefty-Islamic alliance so hates you and your racist truths, buddy.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry:

Imagine if, in 2005, some bayou swamp white nationalist wrote a science fiction novel where, in 2026

– A black man who brags about being mentally retarded is made a full professor at Cambridge to universal acclaim

– The only one brave enough to expose him is a race scientist

– Who is then persecuted by his superior [Petra De Sutter, University of Ghent, who sacked Confas], a male gynaecologist turned transvestite who is, like the black guy, ALSO a fraudster

I would have thrown it at the wall I would have called it the most ridiculous thing I’d ever read. I guess in the book the hero would have been named Hans Herrenrasse and be 7′ tall and blonde and blue eyed, instead of being a soft-spoken Ashkenazi Jew.

How Government Interventions are Strangling The Family’s Will To Reproduce

How Government Interventions are Strangling The Family’s Will To Reproduce. By Felix Yang at The Mises Institute.

Childbearing is, at bottom, a long-horizon investment: a rational actor accepts a low time preference, sinking two decades of capital and labor into a payoff that only matures across generations. That calculation depends entirely on a stable institutional environment in which the link between sacrifice and reward holds.

Modern interventionism, the self-reinforcing pattern Mises identified in which each intervention’s side effects become the pretext for the next, has severed that link through six distinct mechanisms.

1. Socialization of old-age support.

Pay-as-you-go pension systems are, by their own actuarial logic, generational Ponzi schemes: they accumulate no real assets and depend entirely on new entrants to pay existing claims. …

Once old age depends on the political solvency of a pooled fund rather than on the number or quality of children a person raises, raising children loses its economic rationale as an intergenerational contract.

2. Medical monopoly.

Administrative licensing and price controls replace price rationing in healthcare with queue rationing; the scarcity remains, only relabeled. …

When survival itself becomes a bureaucratic waiting list, family planning becomes an act of faith rather than calculation.

3. Nationalization of education

… Modern public education systems — lacking any price mechanism or profit-and-loss discipline — level toward mediocrity, forcing families into a second, private tuition market simply to buy back their children’s competitiveness. Demographer John Caldwell’s Wealth Flows Theory shows that fertility collapses precisely when the direction of intergenerational wealth reverses, from children supporting parents to parents indefinitely subsidizing children, a reversal driven above all by the spread of compulsory schooling.

4. Losing housing sovereignty.

Zoning and land-use regulation manufacture artificial scarcity, transferring wealth from young families to entrenched incumbents …

5. Administrative relief.

When government nationalizes a function that was once a community mutual-aid contract grounded in local knowledge, it does not eliminate poverty; it manufactures a self-perpetuating administrative class with every incentive to manage poverty rather than end it. …

In the United States, the extension of welfare benefits conditioned on remaining unmarried is directly implicated. In Thomas Sowell’s research, the rise of single-parent households among black Americans increased from roughly 22 to 67 percent between 1960 and 1985. …

6. Fiat-currency inflation.

… A family cannot rationally sink twenty years of capital into a child when the currency in which that capital is denominated is being quietly devalued year over year. …

Conclusion:

Each of the six nooses was, in its own time, sold to families as a trade: surrender this piece of sovereignty, and the state will guarantee that safety in return.

Benjamin Franklin’s words … exposed exactly where that trade always ends: those who would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. The family bore that trade six times over and has a falling fertility rate to show for it — the safety was never delivered, and the liberty is gone.

Australia ‘drifting’ towards decline as reform gains are surrendered, Mathias Cormann warns

Australia ‘drifting’ towards decline as reform gains are surrendered, Mathias Cormann warns. By Simon Benson in The Australian.

OECD secretary-general Mathias Cormann, Australia’s longest-serving finance minister, has warned Australia is showing worrying signs of drifting into a slow but relative decline amid a global rule-of-law “recession” and a loss of institutional trust that threaten to undermine the foundations that built Western prosperity. …

“Protection made (Australia) a rich country poorer relative to its peers; openness, competition and the rule of law made it one of the most successful economies on Earth,” Mr Cormann said. “The productivity data now shows what happens when the reform effort stops, and the quiet drift back towards protection shows how easily hard-won gains can be surrendered by increments. …

“There are worrying signs of a quiet drift back towards the instincts Australia once had the courage to abandon. The new protectionism does not look like the old tariff wall; it is subtler, which makes it in some ways more dangerous. It takes the form of industry subsidies, local content rules and procurement preferences, a steady re-regulation of the labour market, and a rising burden of approvals and compliance that slows investment.

“Each measure has a plausible individual rationale: security of supply, sovereign capability, fairness. But collectively, they recreate the exact logic of the old system: visible benefits for the assisted few, invisible costs spread across the many, and capital steered by government preference rather than competitive merit. And beyond this, there is something even more subtle. The perpetual accumulation of outdated rules and regulations.”

He said the drift mirrored a global pattern being observed by the OECD.

“For a mid-sized nation that lives by trade, joining a subsidy race it cannot win, while its productivity engine idles, is a strategy for slow relative decline,” he said.

Mr Cormann acknowledged that from the mid-2000s, under both Coalition and Labor governments, the reform effort had faded. “The mining boom disguised the cost for a decade, because national income kept rising even as the underlying engine slowed,” he said. …

The lesson of Argentina:

“In 1900, Argentina and Australia were twin economies: vast, temperate, resource-rich settler nations, both among the richest countries on Earth per capita, both feeding and clothing the world from fertile plains. An observer at the time might have bet on Argentina. Yet over the following century the paths of Argentina and Australia diverged spectacularly. Australia built durable, impartial institutions — an independent judiciary, a professional civil service, stable democratic transitions — and, crucially, when its post-war protectionist model ran out of road, it found the political means to reform, opening its economy from the 1980s onward and locking in decades of unbroken growth.”

By comparison, Argentina fell into what Mr Cormann called a cycle of institutional volatility with coups, constitutional crisis and a corrupted judicial system, instability of property rights and rampant inflation. “Same endowments, same era, same opportunities in the world economy — but one country made its rules predictable and its politics self-correcting, while the other made both negotiable and unstable,” he said.

“The Argentine case study is the strongest evidence we have that resource wealth and a promising starting position guarantee nothing. Institutional capital must be maintained.”

Rex Widerstrom at The Epoch Times:

Fewer Australians are putting their capital into businesses …

The proportion of working-age Australians who run a business which employs people fell from 13.8 percent in 2002 to just 9.8 percent in 2022, according to the report called “Bricks, not Businesses.”

Over the same period, the numbers of people who own at least one investment property went up by 8.1 percentage points.

Woke War I has led to Woke War 2, which is unleashing a Communist-Islamist fury

Woke War I has led to Woke War 2, which is unleashing a Communist-Islamist fury. By Abe Greenwald at Commentary.

Last week, I wrote about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s assessment that “Woke 1 was crazy.” While many on the right are angered by her lighthearted dismissal of what was a massively destructive and violent force in American life, my concerns mainly lie elsewhere. It’s counterproductive to relitigate the last war when the next one is already upon us. …

 

 

Woke 1, for all its horrors, expressed maximalist and deformed versions of very American sentiments. Its obsession with “black lives” and “white privilege” was tied to America’s undying remorse over the country’s original sin of slavery. The call to defund the police can be seen as a twisted strain of our exceptional anti-authoritarianism. And the unbridled gender madness was a debauched declaration of individual liberty.

Woke 2 is foreign in every respect. The Democratic Socialists of America aren’t talking about tearing down statues. They have plans to raze or replace the basic architecture of American governance, including the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. They want to abolish capitalism and private property. They eschew individual liberty for class consciousness. There is no meaningful or legitimate precedent in American history for this kind of movement. It is overtly Soviet and Maoist …

The Islamists changed the focus of left identity politics and centered it on the longstanding grievance of the Middle East’s Muslims: from black Americans to Palestinians in Gaza, and from white Americans to Jews worldwide. …

Woke 2 is unleashing a Communist-Islamist fury. It’s wokeness boiled down to its darkest, most illiberal essences: compulsion and bigotry. My point was that Woke 2 is evil, and evil is more persuasive than crazy is. …

Prediction:

I don’t think for a moment that homegrown Gen Z Marxists and Islamists will finally achieve what their stronger, more committed forbears couldn’t. …  These movements are seeded with failure, especially in an American context. They’re antithetical to our understanding of human flourishing, and we should expect to see a large majority of the country reject them.

But, like the ruined regimes that they’re trying to import, they can do a tremendous amount of damage before they’re defeated. Which is why I’d rather focus on the fight before us than roam the battlefields of Woke War I.

 

The debt monster is coming into view

The debt monster is coming into view. By Adam Creighton in The Australian.

Our governments borrowed like there was no tomorrow during the Covid pandemic, issuing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds during 2020 and 2021 at ultra-low interest rates to “keep us safe”. …

The federal government’s gross liabilities this week bobbed above $1 trillion for the first time. … State governments’ non-financial public sector balance sheets reveal another $706bn as of June …

Rising interest rates will destroy the welfare state and introduce raging inflation, as the bonds/loans need refinancing:

The four biggest states have almost $277bn of bonds outstanding, with coupons, or interest costs, averaging around 2 per cent …

When those sweet deals progressively expire from 2031, they’ll need to be refinanced at current long-term borrowing rates, which for state governments are around 5.5 per cent for 10 years, adding well over $8bn a year to their annual interest costs. …

To put that in perspective, the entirety of Victoria’s payroll and insurance taxes will be just about enough to cover the state’s annual interest bill. …

The commonwealth faces the same problem, too, having around $280bn of cheap Covid-era debt on the books at a coupon of 3 per cent or less.

Toby Johnston, former chief economist of the Future Fund, estimates those bonds will cost an extra $9.5bn a year from 2030 on, assuming the federal government faces today’s prevailing 10-year yield of 5 per cent.

Of course, interest rates could well be higher still, given grim forecasts embedded in practically every government balance sheet in the developed world.

“The global bond market is sending a clear signal to all governments – get your house in order or face much higher debt service costs,” Johnston, now director of Westwood Strategic Advisers, tells me.

“Every additional dollar spent servicing past debt is a dollar that cannot be used to fund services, reduce taxes or invest in the national’s future,” he adds.

The cycle has turned. The trend forecast is for rising interest rates for the next 40 years, in contrast to the 40 years of falling interest rates to 2022. Falling interest rates allowed everyone to load up on debt, expecting to be able to refinance it and never pay back the principal. Thus, massive amounts of money were created (money is debt in our current system — look it up if you doubt it), and asset markets are all stretched to the upside (except for the competitors to paper currencies, of course).

Uh uh, that has ended. The inevitable inflation from those low interest rates is now an irrepressible problem, so interest rates must rise to suppress inflation. But rising interest rates will send governments and corporates bust. So, governments will keep interest rates artificially low some more, which will just feed the inflation further. The over creation of money will thereby continue, just not as strongly as it has since 1982.Which will require even higher interest rates at some point down the road, to rein in that inflation.

The doom loop is approaching, as we can see in the account of Australian government debts as above.

Japan is perhaps the most indebted government in the West, because it kept interest rates near zero for so long. If Japan’s entire stock of government bonds were refinanced at its current 2.9% interest rate, interest alone would consume about 42% of current tax revenues. At an average rate of about 6.9%, interest would consume the entire tax take. Clearly, something has to bust.

For the US, the interest rate that consumes all the tax income is 14%.

In the US, interest already exceeds the defense budget, and it’s only going higher as bonds are refinanced at higher rates.

If Anthony Albanese treated radical Muslims like he did everyday gun owners

If Anthony Albanese treated radical Muslims like he did everyday gun owners. By The Mocker in The Australian.

Imagine:

To begin with, this demographic would be made to understand they have no automatic right to be a radical Muslim. Freedom of religion, including Islam, is a right but political Islam is not. Left unchecked, this ideology is a threat to democracy and the secular state. We cannot allow the demands of a noisy minority to prevail over the right of all Australians to live safely in a free society.

To safeguard this we must control radical Muslims by limiting their number and containing their ability to inflict harm. The government will strictly regulate the preaching of Islamist ideology, ensuring that unlicensed radical Muslims face criminal prosecution.

A register of firebrands:

Accordingly, the government will create a National Firebrands Register. All radical Muslims, if they wish to continue to peddle their ideology, will have to apply for a licence.

A licence is not a given. Many applications will be refused because the bar will be high. The absence of a criminal history is not in itself sufficient to qualify for a radical Muslim licence. Even if granted, the licence will be suspended or revoked if the holder does not attend de-escalation and safety training each year.

No longer will we import radical Muslims to this country. As for domestic radical Muslims, they must, as part of the requirements for a licence, undertake to store base level angry Islamist material in an approved lockable container. Licences will not cover possession of super angry or downright nasty Islamist material, which will be forbidden. Police will ensure compliance by conducting random and regular inspections.

Possession of base level angry Islamist material will be capped at four publications. It can be accessed, read, and discussed only at registered mosques. These mosques in turn must be licensed. They will be obliged by law to keep records of attendance as well as verify the licences of radical Muslims. Failure to do will result in their immediate closure.

Above all, applicants will need a valid reason to be a radical Muslim. They will also have to prove they are a fit and proper person. No doubt radical Muslims will angrily protest and insist the process is punitive and obstructionist, but too bad. The priority is getting Islamist material off the streets.

Compensation:

Many radical Muslims will say this policy will make life in Australia intolerable for them. They will have a point. As such, it is only fair the government chips in for them to relocate to their country of origin. Admittedly the subsidy range ($450-$1000) will not be anything near the total cost involved, but again stiff cheddar.

Consultation:

As for criticism the government did not consult the radical Muslim community about these changes, Albanese need only paraphrase what he said when announcing firearm restrictions in December 2025 following the Bondi massacre. No consultation would be necessary as the government is committed to “strong, decisive and focused action” on social cohesion and immigration reform. …

Suppose gun owners were organized like Muslims:

Imagine that gun owners are largely urban dwellers concentrated in the safe federal Labor electorates of Western Sydney.

Now imagine that gun owners are virulently antisemitic. Picture them dancing joyfully en masse in the streets and letting off firecrackers following news of the biggest pogrom against Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Now picture a mob of gun owners surrounding Sydney Opera House and menacingly chanting “Where’s the Jews” as the building is lit up in blue and white to commemorate the victims of the massacre. Meanwhile in Western Sydney, prominent gun owners tell their ilk that Jewish people are “descendants of pigs and monkeys”.

The founders of the US feared a standing army above all else, because a standing army guaranteed government supremacy and oppression in the long run, so it was the main enemy of liberty. The second amendment was the next best thing, to keep government power in check.

You work it out. Hint:

UK introduces ‘Catch and Release’ for wrongthink

UK introduces ‘Catch and Release’ for wrongthink. By Graham Linehan, writer of the sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd.

A recent — chilling — incident:

Jake Munro spent eight days in the south of Ireland with his girlfriend and their 6 year-old son. On the way home, four Welsh police officers pulled him out of the ferry queue at Pembroke Dock and took his fingerprints. …

A mountainous policeman knocked on his window and suggested they take a stroll. Inside the security hut, four officers told him he was being detained for “suspected right-wing ideologies” and would be questioned. After the questioning, he was told, depending on how it went, he might be arrested.

He wasn’t questioned about a specific crime, or a specific threat, or a plot. This was a survey. Was he affiliated with any right-wing nationalist or patriot groups? Was he agitating the British public to take things into their own hands? What did he think about Muslims? What did he think about migration? What did he think about trans people, and did he consider himself an active threat to them? What did he think was the biggest problem revolving around Jews?

He was fingerprinted. Photographed. Held for four hours. At the end of it, an officer told him they had no grounds to hold him for terrorism, incitement, or anything else, and drove him back to an empty car. His phone had been cloned, which is presumably where the four hours went. He missed his ferry and paid for a hotel he hadn’t planned on, finally rejoining his girlfriend who had been ‘beside herself’, not knowing if the father of her son had been arrested. …

Its their new tactic:

This, of course, is all very familiar to me. I was arrested at Heathrow in 2025 for objecting to men in women’s private spaces. Held, questioned, and eventually paid compensation by the Met, because even they could see how it looked once it made the papers. That case matters here because the police learned the wrong lesson from it.

They didn’t stop policing opinion. They stopped arresting people for it. An arrest leaves a record, a complaint, a lawyer, a headline, maybe even a payout. A four-hour ‘detention’ at a port with no charge leaves none of that. The UK plod are still acting as thought police, but leaving no paper trail.

Ruling class oppressing us:

Look at the shape of the questionnaire: Muslims, migration, nationalist groups, incitement. It’s a checklist of the opinions the modern British left is afraid ordinary people are starting to hold, dressed up as a threat assessment. …

No charge. Just a checklist of phobias drawn up by the lanyard class, and four hours spent on a fishing expedition before they had to throw him back. That’s the UK in 2026, and I’m glad I’m out of it.

hat-tip Phil

Australia is no longer a safe-space from air attack. In a Pacific war, Australia will be hit — early, often, and hard

Australia is no longer a safe-space from air attack. In a Pacific war, Australia will be hit — early, often, and hard. By Cdr Salamanader.

 

 

Australia has almost no defenses from aerial attack, because until recently we were so far away from potential attackers. From The West Australian newspaper:

Privately, US officials are also alarmed at the protection levels of Australian bases, including HMAS Stirling and RAAF Base Darwin, where significant numbers of US personnel and military assets will be operating.

Earlier this month a conservative and influential Trump-aligned think tank urged Australia to spend billions buying US-made missile interceptors to defend key bases from Chinese military attack. …

U.S. bases in Australia:

From the Australian United States Study Centre (USSC) report:

Currently, the Australian Army has very limited GBAD [ground based air defense] capabilities, with only two batteries of modern mid-tier National Advanced Surface-to-air Missile Systems (NASAMS) being brought into service. …

Australia’s ground-based ballistic missile capabilities are, however, basically non-existent.

Salamander:

That will wake you up. Well, I hope it does. What is one of the greatest lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 and the ongoing conflict between Israel and the U.S. and Iran and her proxies? Simple: the normalization of the use of conventionally armed ballistic missiles with precision warheads. …

There is already a line out the door for PAC-3, SM-3, SM-6, THAAD, and a pony for Christmas. …

The U.S. Navy had some great plans for their navalized version of the PAC-3 to fill the gap due to limited production capability of the SM-3 and SM-6, but I think history has other plans. The Free World’s demand for PAC-3 is simply too great.

The executive summary:

The PRC [China] has an answer for AUKUS, and AUKUS has to think about more weapons systems than just submarines.

Australia is not a safe-space. She needs serious defense. Should war come to the Pacific, Australia will be hit — early, often, and hard.

Australia needs to get in the air defense business as soon as practical, with the best around Perth. Want to knock Australia out of the war quickly or at a minimum cause internal unrest? In strangely anti-nuclear Australia, sink a SSN pierside with a hypersonic missile and crack open the reactor…that would do it. …

From my seat, there cannot be enough integration of U.S., Australian, and Japanese defense concerns. They are both superb militaries and good friends, and our interests in the Western Pacific have 90% overlap.

Illegal immigration and financial incentives in Trump’s America

Illegal immigration and financial incentives in Trump’s America. By Wall Street Apes.

More than 100,000 illegals have been mailed huge fines by the Trump Administration for being in America illegally

“A Michigan immigrant recently opened his mailbox and learned the federal government was fining him $579,838. He’s one of more than a hundred thousand people who’s gotten one of these new fines under the Trump administration”

The goal of issuing these fines is to encourage self deportation or face financial ruin

The civil penalties are being issued against people who have deportation orders, but remained in the United States

“They’ve been legal since 1996, but they were rarely used until President Donald Trump took office again. Under the law, the federal government can charge someone $998 dollars for every day they stayed in the country after an immigration judge ordered them removed. They max out at $1.8 million dollars”

The federal government says if someone leaves on their own, the fines will be erased. In addition to having their fines waived they will also get a free flight and a $2,600 check as an exit bonus.

If you’re an illegal this is your sign to self deport

If the person accumulates these fines and doesn’t self deport. When they’re caught by ICE if they ever went to come back into America these civil penalties will need to be paid. Meaning it’ll be basically impossible to pay these off and come back.

Why doesn’t ICE just arrest them? Because it’s cheaper and easier to just fine them into leaving. From ChatGPT:

ICE can generally arrest these people. A final removal order gives DHS the authority to apprehend and remove them; immigration judges decide removability, while DHS/ICE handles actual apprehension and detention.

So why fine them instead?

The main reason is that knowing someone has a removal order is much easier than physically finding and arresting them. There are about 1.4 million people with final removal orders, scattered across the country. ICE has finite officers, detention beds, transport capacity and diplomatic/removal logistics. A fine can be generated administratively for thousands of people without sending teams to thousands of houses.

There is also an important practical constraint: ICE can’t simply break into someone’s home because it has an immigration warrant — which is administrative, not a judicial search warrants. So ICE may know exactly who somebody is and approximately where they live, yet still need to encounter them at work, in public, at a courthouse, during a traffic/arrest handover, etc.

Compare:

UN Stats Show Gaza As Well Fed as Germany and the UK

UN Stats Show Gaza As Well Fed as Germany and the UK. By Daniel Greenfield at Front Page.

A new UNICEF survey shows that not only isn’t there a famine in Gaza, but the Hamas settlers of the terrorist enclave are some of the best fed in the Middle East.

The UNICEF-led survey rated ‘acute malnutrition’ among children under 5 years old in the Gaza Strip as being at 0.5%. As UN Watch noted, this compares to World Bank data showing a rate of 0.4% in the UK, 0.5% in Germany, 1.6% in Finland and 3.3% in Egypt. … Lebanon at 1.3%, Turkey at 1.6%, neighboring Jordan at 2.3%, Iraq at 3.0%, Afghanistan at 3.6% and Pakistan at 7.1%. …

Acute child malnutrition, the subject of hoax photoshoots in the New York Times showing disabled children, is on par and sometimes better than some European nations including Germany and even the UK.

 

18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq had cerebral palsy; he wasn’t like this for lack of food. Notice that his mother isn’t emaciated. His well-fed brother just to the lower right was cropped out of this famous image. The Guardian subsequently acknowledged that it did not know about his medical condition when it first published the image, but it still cropped the photo.

 

That stands to reason since massive amounts of spending continue to be expended on Gaza.

The UN’s World Food Programme, which helped manufacture and spread fake claims of famine while refusing to deliver food, is currently asking for $426 million to continue its operations. …

The UN admitted that 95% of its Gaza aid trucks were ‘intercepted’. The vast amounts of aid shipped to Gaza were diverted by Hamas and then sold at markets to subsidize its operations and prolong the war. …

The latest UN data comes after the famine hoax, like the genocide hoax, had been widely disproven with both statistics and anecdotal social media videos showing supermarkets and restaurants in Gaza. USAID alone made off with over $2 billion in taxpayer money to save Gaza from a crisis that didn’t exist while propping up Islamist and Marxist war propaganda. …

Not Muslims:

While billions of dollars were lavished on a famine hoax in an Islamic terror statelet, countries with actual food shortages were abandoned by the United Nations, activists and the media. A report in June 2026 found that in Papua New Guinea, “nearly 47.6% of children under the age of five suffer from chronic stunting due to long-term nutritional deficiencies—more than double the global average.”

We were lied to, weren’t we? Now the truth comes out, years afterwards, to no publicity.

To every leftist who supported illegal migrants entering Ceuta,  who does not want secure borders

To every leftist who supported illegal migrants entering Ceuta,  who does not want secure borders. By Basil the Great.

Remember the Spanish girl who was waving at migrants welcoming them into Ceuta?

 

Big mistake, young girl

 

The latest reports are she has gone missing.

 

Spain’s own national Police Union JUPOL has put out an emergency warning to get young girls off the streets of Ceuta

– Girls are being grabbed by migrant gangs and dragged into the mountains to be gang raped

– The media aren’t even reporting this, it’s the POLICE

 

 

Doctors in Ceuta are now reporting that they have treated at least 15 girls who have been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by migrants in the Spanish city of Ceuta

You have to be kidding:

This furious woman is confronted by police in Ceuta because her dog is upsetting the Muslims

She says the only way she can feel protected is with her dog because they are scared of it

Invite the third world, become the third world.

Multiculturalism is replacing western civilization with third world thinking — impartiality is a bizarre and fragile Western invention

Multiculturalism is replacing western civilization with third world thinking — impartiality is a bizarre and fragile Western invention. By Jeremy Boering.

This is well worth listening to. It makes the most powerful argument against multiculturalism (the trivialities of cuisine and skin color are of course ignored). He oversimplifies Carl Schmitt, but otherwise nails it.

First the observation that the sneer is now the argument, because we have abandoned the western tradition that separated the west from the rest (1:16):

The internet has changed the way we think, reason, and argue… for the worse.

 

Here is the full version (39:37):

There are two worldviews at war right now — and one of them is losing:

The West’s objective morality and equal standing under the law, and the third-world thinking of tribe over justice and status over integrity.

 

I wasn’t able to find a transcript, but Apple podcasts and ChatGPT capture the essence, which I’ve made into the following mashup.

The West’s distinctive achievement isn’t just democracy, capitalism or technology; it is the replacement of tribal/honor-based ways of deciding truth and justice with impersonal rules.

By way of example, Boreing opens by contrasting two “trials.” One is an actual criminal proceeding, where evidence has to be produced, rules followed, the accused is presumed innocent, and claims can be challenged. The other is the kind of “trial” that now happens on podcasts and social media, where allegations spread through insinuation, gossip and popularity, and where likes and shares effectively become the jury.

Boreing argues that the distance between those two trials is the distance between Western civilization and everything that came before it — and that we are walking backwards across it faster than most people realize.

Cross-cultural researchers distinguish between guilt/innocence cultures and honor/shame cultures:

  • In a guilt/innocence culture (western culture, evolved in the last two millennia), the important question is “Is the claim true? Did this person actually do it?” The same rule is supposed to apply to friend and enemy.
  • In an honor/shame culture (the default human condition, the culture in the third world) the important question becomes “Who is saying it? Is he one of us? Has he insulted us? Who looks strong and who looks humiliated?” Consequently, personal attacks, sneers, mockery and dominance displays aren’t distractions from the argument in an honour culture — they effectively are the argument. “Me and my cousins and my tribe out-muscle you, so we win and you will be cancelled if you persist.” Most of the world runs on honor and shame. Your worth is issued by the people watching and can be revoked by them, and an unanswered insult is a kind of social death.

Obviously, under the influence of the postmodern left who choose power over truth, and third world immigration, American political discourse is increasingly operating as an honor culture. Often now, in American public square, the mob’s verdict has quietly replaced the evidence. The two cultures cannot coexist in the same society, because one inevitably wins out and becomes the monoculture. So choose one, carefully.

We tend to regard things such as fixed prices, contracts, impartial courts, property rights and honest weights and measures as almost natural. They’re not. Historically, patronage, corruption, clan loyalty, confiscation and bargaining with whoever holds power are much closer to the human norm.

Boreing makes the case for how strange the West actually is — starting with the price tag. A fixed price is not natural. Corruption is natural. The haggle is natural.

What the West built instead was impersonal exchange: contracts a court would enforce, property a king couldn’t seize, honest weights and measures commanded by the God of Israel and enforced for centuries by a Church that treated cheating a stranger as a matter for your soul. Nobel-winning economist Douglass North traced the explosion of Western prosperity to that structure.

Western civilisation laboriously developed institutions in which strangers could trust one another without belonging to the same family or tribe. A merchant doesn’t charge you according to whether you’re his cousin; a court can enforce a contract between two strangers; ideally the judge doesn’t care which faction you belong to.

Church restrictions on cousin marriage — weakened extended kinship clans and contributed to unusually individualistic Western societies. That leads to the key sentence lurking underneath the whole monologue:

Western civilisation asks you to put truth above tribe.

His illustration is John Adams defending the British soldiers charged after the Boston Massacre. Adams considered them political enemies, but thought they were nevertheless entitled to a fair trial. Boreing contrasts that with the principle that my brother/my faction/my people must be defended regardless of what they did.

Boreing thinks parts of both the radical Left and the post-liberal Right are abandoning the same Western principle from opposite directions.

The radical Left says supposedly neutral institutions — property, contracts, markets, law — were really mechanisms by which one group oppressed another. Therefore justice means correcting the power imbalance rather than insisting upon formally neutral rules. So in with permanent DEI and out with meritocracy. Your identity group is more important than your individual characteristics.

The post-liberal/tribal Right (e.g. Candace Owens) says neutrality itself is foolish: politics is fundamentally about friends and enemies, so our people should use power to reward friends and punish enemies. Boreing notes Tucker Carlson’s 2015 rule that he (Carlson) would never criticize his brother in public, under any circumstances, even for mass murder. That’s the tribe placed above the truth. Blood over justice. Most of the world would hear it and nod.

And Boreing’s point is that these sound radically different but lead somewhere remarkably similar:

Group identity outranks universal rules.

That, he argues, isn’t some exciting new political philosophy. It is essentially a return to the normal human condition before the peculiar institutional development of the West.

So when he calls it “Third-World thinking,” he isn’t principally making an argument about ethnicity or immigration. He’s referring to a social order where:

  • Who you know matters more than the rule;
  • Who said something matters more than whether it’s true;
  • Loyalty outweighs impartial justice; and
  • Institutions cease to function impersonally.

His concluding point is actually optimistic. Fixed prices, impartial juries, enforceable contracts and parents willing to turn in even their own child weren’t inevitable products of human nature. People built them. Therefore their erosion isn’t inevitable either: societies can consciously choose those norms again.

The thesis is thus that impartiality itself is a bizarre and fragile Western invention. This is why we shouldn’t have multiculturalism.

The economic squeeze hitting young Australians, many of whom are turning to One Nation

The economic squeeze hitting young Australians, many of whom are turning to One Nation. By Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian.

A great many normally affluent parents have seen the price of their dwellings in the $1.5m to $10m range fall by more than 20 per cent. They are ahead in their mortgage payment requirements, but the house price fall impacts confidence. …

If the children want to maintain spending, they will need to use more of their spare time working in casual jobs. …

Almost all enterprises in 2025–26 suffered an increase of about 10 per cent in business operating costs. Hiring freezes have spread around the business community. That means that it’s harder to get part-time work for young people, and the ACTU wants their pay rates increased, which will savage jobs.

And then, as we move up the age scale to post-university-degree young people, it has become very fashionable to save money with part-time work, augment it with some family cash, and head off overseas to enjoy life.

They then come home with no money but in the past, they could return and easily top up with casual work while spending time selecting the best organisation to start a career. Those post-university jobs are now harder to find.

Hiring freezes, as a result of cost rises and technology change, extend to new recruits, and while there is some hiring, it is restricted.

And so, after the freedoms of living overseas, young people are forced to live with their parents. They can’t easily leave because Chalmers has taken actions to boost already high rents much further. …

Those returning from travels in 2026 will be wondering whether Mum and Dad will be prepared to stump up future guarantees for their younger children, particularly if the parental dwelling is being used as capital for the family business.

Today’s younger generation is about to be taught a lesson that was not experienced by their parents. It was their grandparents who experienced tough times and falling property prices.

Most in the younger generation and their parents have tended to downgrade the importance of which party they vote into government.

It remains to be seen whether the current experience of the younger generation impacts their voting patterns, but from the opinion polls, it seems they are swinging to One Nation.

High immigration is making their situations worse, and it’s easy to understand — lower wages due to competition, higher rent and house prices, higher crime, and loss of culture.