How to dramatically raise productivity

How to dramatically raise productivity. By Professor Richard Werner, from an interview with the UK’s Peter McCormack (below). Werner is a financial sector expert and experienced global macro fund manager, and a Professor of Banking, Finance and Economics at a number of universities in Europe.

Basically the post-war Japanese success was due to a fairly straightforward implementation of what is possible. The Japanese had researched quite well what can we achieve, what can be done? And they thought, oh, we can have high growth, 15% growth for decades. It’s actually possible. Let’s do it. That was announced, for example, by a new prime minister at the time, Ikeda, in 1960, who announced, well, we’re going to double national income in the next 10 years.

A storm of opposition — that’s nonsense, impossible, cannot be done. All the economists outraged: what, how dare you, this cannot be done, impossible. Well, they did it in four and a half years, way ahead of schedule. Of course it can be done. And so they kept doing it. And then it turned out that basically Japan was considered too successful by very powerful players …

Well, it delivered 15% growth for decades. It made — you double national income every four and a half years at 15% growth, and it can be done. They’ve proven it can be done.

And then Korea, Taiwan, Singapore copied it. And then in 1978, China copied it. Deng Xiaoping came to power, and the first thing he did is, let’s go to Japan. He went there with 300 of his top people, and he told the Japanese, “Okay guys, we’ve done a lot of ideology, the deductive approach, the Ricardo approach, which is logical arguments, the Mao Red Book. We’re all tired of that. We’re throwing out ideology. We just want to do pragmatic stuff that works. I’ve come here as a student. Teach me — how can I have double-digit growth?” And they told him, and that’s what China did.

Of course, the key was the monetary system. They asked him, so how many banks do you have? Oh, one bank, central planning. Well, the central planners love it — power maximization, control, but it doesn’t really work well. It works for the controllers, but everyone else is unhappy, more or less. …

Werner and his team studied banks in the West:

What we found analyzing those 5,000 banks of different sizes is it’s a very simple principle, which, you know, it’s not surprising, makes common sense. But again, the finance literature had sort of disputed it. Namely, it’s a rule in banking that we confirmed: big banks want to do big deals with big customers. They need to.

Who lends to small firms? It’s small banks. And that’s it. But that changes everything, because when you then consolidate the banking system, like in the UK, nobody lends to small firms. …

Big banks cannot be bothered doing small loans, because all loans take roughly the same amount of due diligence and paperwork — but the profit is proportional to the size of the loan. Big loans are vastly more profitable than small loans. So small business is starved of capital, and is consequently less productive.

A concentrated banking system, with just a few big banks, inevitably causes productivity to drop because the small business sector is overcapitalized.

Let me remind you of how a typical small business operates. Someone has a business idea. To get the business started, they need some capital (money), so they borrow some. If the business works, they pay it back and perhaps expand, etc. Similarly, an existing business may need capital in order to by the newest equipment, or to expand and reap economies of scale. The productivity gains provided by the new business idea or the new equipment depend on the availability of capital. And big banks just aren’t that interested in small loans.

The vast majority of people work for small firms. Small and medium-sized companies employ two-thirds, usually, of employment. The UK — yeah, 65%, roughly. In Germany and Japan, it used to be actually higher, between 70% and 80%. Anyway, this is the majority works for small firms. And now how can their productivity be higher?

Well, I’ll tell you why German small-firm productivity in the past … [had high] productivity … Whenever new technology came up, small firms would realize — I mean, they go to the fairs in their industry, the Messe and so on — and they realize, okay, these are new trends. And of course, oh, there’s a new technology that affects our industry, our sector, our market niche. Well, we’ve got to get it. It means we’ve got to spend some money, we’ve got to master that. We’re going to buy that technology and apply it. Where do we get the money from? Well, we go to our local bank, and that’s the system in Germany.

There’s — the number’s also been declining, but there’s still around 1,200 small local banks, cooperative banks mostly, some savings banks. And you go to the local bank and you explain — they know you already, because they only lend locally, they will not lend outside their local area, so they know all the firms there. Oh yeah, so you guys — okay, there’s this new technology, you guys want to get that? Okay, let’s look at the plans here. And within maybe two days, they would have the money and they can buy the technology, implement it.

In the UK, forget it. There’s just nothing. Yeah, they find out, okay, there’s this new technology, we got to get it. Oh, it’s too expensive, we can’t do it. Okay, let’s find a workaround, or other ways of — but they can’t really get the funding, that’s the problem. And so productivity stays low. And why is that? Because the banks are large, and large banks only do large customers, large business. They don’t want to deal with small firms. And that’s all it is.

Now, the consolidation of the UK banking system took place before the First World War. And the problem therefore has been known — I mean, every few years we have these studies, not just on productivity, there’s also studies on the banking sector, the problems with the UK banking sector. And they always come to the same conclusion — wow, it’s a concentrated banking sector. And there’s this great report, the Colwyn Report, which says that, yeah, the problem is a concentrated banking system. The Big Five dominate banking, they don’t lend to small firms and they give only short-term loans, one-year, two-year loans. And so that’s the problem. …

And that report, the Colwyn Report, I think a parliamentary committee, was published in 1918. So more than a century ago, the problem had been identified. But what had been done about it? Nothing,…

If you want a healthy, wealthy economy doing well, people doing well, you need many small banks.

Might upset the wrong people:

But in this country [the UK], there are strong interests in the City of London against this. I mean, if you want to set up a new bank for the super rich and you make your business case that, well, the super rich need a special bank, oh, you get the banking license in record time. But try to set up a local community bank — that’s definitely not going to be easy, to put it mildly. …

I can easily demonstrate that we can have in the UK 10% growth. I mean, give me the job at the Bank of England — the Bank of England could engineer 10%, 12% growth for two decades. But to do that, you need to implement policies that some very influential people don’t like. …

The most important thing is to establish many small banks, local banks, because it immediately takes some of their centralized power, the central planning power, and decentralizes it and spreads out the power, the decision-making power.

That’s what Deng Xiaoping was told by the Japanese when he asked them, tell me the secret of high growth. And they said, what, you only got one bank for a billion people?

How about you create 5,000 banks, and each bank has 30 branches, and each branch has 35 loan officers? Then you will have more than 5 million loan officers that each year will receive hundreds of millions of loan applications from small — because these are small banks, they need to lend to, and they will lend to small firms — from small firms. …

So you’ve moved from a centralized system — essentially the Soviet central planning system that the UK is very close to really, with five banks and the Bank of England, that’s pretty centralized — and China with one bank. So then they switched from the Soviet system to the highly successful decentralized system, which is what all the high-growth economies have done. When Britain was successful, it had thousands of banks.

We’re talking now, of course, about the 19th century, when growth was double digits. And there were literally thousands of banks. …

How to get high growth again:

Economic growth is simply a direct proportional function of bank credit creation for productive business investment. In other words, bank loans, the quantity of bank loans to productive businesses. And when you lend to small firms, that’s mostly productive, and that’s a simple way of doing it.

Therefore, if you set up 5,000 small local banks, as Deng Xiaoping did, then you will get a lot of investment in productive things, and you will get implementation of technology on a large scale, but decentralized. You get high growth — 15% growth for decades, four decades, as it happened — lifting more people out of poverty than anywhere else before. That can be done in any country. Other countries have demonstrated it. And so, you know, Britain can do this. We can have this high economic growth.

What limits? Ask Elon.

What about limits to growth? Well, there aren’t any limits, because growth is driven by productivity. Productivity is driven by technology. Technology is invented by humans. And the ultimate limit is human ingenuity. And nobody’s found a limit to that one.

To set up a bank you need a banking license from the government. And those are very difficult to obtain nowadays.

There has big bank consolidation over the last three decades throughout the western world. In that same period, the rate of productivity increase dropped and dropped. The two facts are connected.

Australia now has only five or six big banks, and that’s it. Back when productivity growth was higher, we had many banks and building societies. A small local bank or loan desk knows the local people and who is a good risk — but big banks generally do not.

hat-tip Peter S.

You don’t understand how radical these young white men already are

You don’t understand how radical these young white men already are. By Infantry Dort.

Young white men are the most vilified cohort in the modern age. What shocks me is how people don’t understand what history says about vilified cohorts.

Many people over the age of 40 simply forget, young white men don’t remember the super egalitarian post war order. The world we grew up in no longer exists.

We were taught judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. MLK etc etc. And by God, I still live by that. I see the divine spark in others. It’s what makes being a Soldier in this nation possible. We don’t care what you look like. Everyone is equally worthless.

But sometime after the 90s, tribalism was injected back into this place. The super rare conditions that allowed for so many in this nation to live under one flag withered away. And it became politically useful to demonize one group above all others; white men.

Young white men under 30/40 don’t remember the 90s mostly. All they know is that there needs to be less of them. Politicians and media effortlessly say the future needs to belong to anyone but them.

Where do you think this ends?

What does history teach us about where this ends? Truly. Do your homework. Because you don’t understand how radical these men already are.

Imagine growing up and being told you’re the fucking villain of civilization every single day. You can’t get a job, an education, dating access, all because you are…. the villain.

It’s not safe to say young white men are the problem anymore. In fact, it never should have been. But the further people go down this narrative path, the worse the reaction is going to be.

Sorry boomers, but your grandkids aren’t all lazy shitbags. They’re reactionary zealots in waiting who have worldviews that would make the despots of the 20th century blush.

There is NO relief valve for them politically. They think both political parties in the United States are comfortable maligning them, and they’re right.

Understand the powder keg you sit on right now. The dry timber ready for someone to strike one match. I mean do what you want. That’s America, right? Shit on them if you need to. But don’t cry when it ends as predictably as history says it will.

Do you know what the most destructive force in human history is?

It isn’t a weapon or an army. It’s young men with nothing to live for. And today’s most “acceptably” maligned cohort happens to be young white men.

Every civilization that forgot how to give its young men purpose eventually met them on the battlefield. Every single empire that scorned its sons ended the same way.

When men are denied purpose, mocked for their instincts, priced out of homes, shut out of marriage, and treated as expendable, they eventually stop protecting the system that rejected them.

These are the men who rally to strong voices. They march behind banners promising righteous belonging. And when they move, the world moves with them.

A society that mocks masculinity is a society playing with fire. Young men are not inherently violent. They are VITAL. Whether they build cathedrals or burn cities depends entirely on whether the civilization that raised them still deserves their loyalty.

TLDR. The lesson is to respect your sons. Or you’ll one day meet them as Soldiers. Don’t take it up with me and get angry. Take it up with history.

I sure Anthony Albanese and the woke ruling class have a perfectly fine form of worlds that says this is all completely wrong.

What’s President Trump been up to?

What’s President Trump been up to?

President Trump was just asked what his midterm message is for millions of Americans to vote red:

  • 17 months in a row of ZERO illegal crossings
  • The best crime numbers in history, even after Democrats let in 25 million people
  • The most jobs in the history of the United States
  • Murders are lower than at any time since 1900
  • New plants are being built every day, like today’s $18B investment
  • $21 TRILLION being invested in America, the most in history. China has only $3 trillion, and Biden had just half a trillion
  • The war will be won very soon
  • Gas prices will come tumbling down
  • Democrats want to open the border back up

Iran war (WSJ):

Iran’s ability to choke off oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz — and use that as leverage in talks with the U.S. — is breaking down.

 

Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz have rebounded significantly, with recent data indicating volumes are between 72% and 98% of pre-war levels, depending on whether the metric includes bypass pipelines or just the strait itself.

 

The day before the war began in February, traders in Tehran needed about 1.7 million rials for every dollar. They now need more than 2.5 million.

Imagine millions of Americans believing the U.S. was not winning the battle with Germany in March of 1945. That’s where we are today vis-a-vis Iran. Incredible. And it’s not for lack of actual facts reported widely. It is the consequence of the mental prison of TDS.

The press did the same thing during Vietnam.

Drug deaths way down:

Fentanyl deaths are down 55% and Heroin deaths down 89% from their peaks.

That’s a direct result of closing the border and enforcing the laws on the books.

Reduced Muslim immigration by 96%:

Data from the Cato Institute indicates that legal immigration from 45 majority-Muslim nations to the U.S. fell by 96% between December 2024 and February 2026.

The Trump administration celebrated this figure as a policy success, attributing the decline to a combination of entry bans, visa suspensions, and the suspension of the diversity visa lottery.

The reduction was most severe in specific countries: Afghan immigration plummeted by 99.8%, Pakistani immigration fell by 97.9%, and Somali visas dropped by 99.7%.

Legal immigration from other global regions decreased by 36%. Refugee resettlement from majority-Muslim countries was entirely halted, reaching zero admissions by February 2026.

Media manipulates economic gloom — and it’s all about the midterm, by Glenn Reynolds at The New York Post.

US jobless claims tumbled last week to levels not seen in years, retail sales are up and manufacturing is booming.

Importantly, the workforce participation rate is climbing — so the low unemployment numbers aren’t just the result of people giving up on the job search altogether.

As columnist Daniel McCarthy notes, “Establishment economists predicted none of this.” …

Trump’s combination of lighter regulation, tighter restrictions on illegal immigration and protectionist tariffs is translating into more jobs here at home as businesses expand.

New industries, like the private space race led by SpaceX and Starlink, are employing hundreds of thousands and still growing.

New industries, like the private space race led by SpaceX and Starlink, are employing hundreds of thousands and still growing. …

But:

You can make a case that the economy is great or that it’s bad.

You can bet that between now and November, the Democrats and the media — but I repeat myself — will be focusing on the bad.

It’s an old playbook, one that Bill Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn wielded to defeat President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

The economy had actually recovered from a brief recession in 1991, but voters thought otherwise — because the media told them so.

“There is often a huge disconnect between belief about the economy and the true economic state of affairs,” Penn wrote in his 2007 book “Microtrends.”

“Until the statistics are actually published, people tend to assess the economy through the eyes of the national media.”

During the 1992 election, Clinton repeatedly told us we were experiencing the worst economy in 50 years.

The press echoed that message dutifully.

But as Penn recounted with glee, “The statistics that came out after the election showed that the period leading up to November had actually been a period of record growth.”

Ignore the Polls, by Tim O’Brien at PJ Media:

There are two kinds of polls: the “internals” and the “public polls,” also called “media polls” and “independent polls,” although they are hardly independent. …

So, what are “public polls”? Those are the ones everyone in the news media is talking about incessantly right now. Leftist universities, NGOs, media organizations, activist groups, and others pay for them. They serve a very specific purpose, one every conservative should already know.

Public polls are designed to shape public opinion, not reflect it. They are designed to discourage conservative and Republican voters and embolden Democrat and leftist voters. They want to disenfranchise you. They want you to give up and decide not to vote, because they want you to feel that voting this time around is pointless. They want to suppress the vote for Republican candidates.

If a legacy media organization, including Fox News, attaches its name to a public poll, ignore it, especially right now. Between now and the final week before the election, pollsters will oversample Democrat voters and leftists to tilt the scales in favor of Democrat candidates. They will structure the questions to favor the Democrats. They will talk mostly to Democrats. They will shut out Republican candidates and ignore Republican and independent voters.

The Wall Street Journal provides us with a perfect example of how public polls are used to discourage you into giving up. “President Trump’s approval rating drops to 37% in a WSJ poll, the lowest of any president heading into a midterm election in Journal polls dating to 1990.” …

Most legacy media organizations … shore up their results in the final days prior to the election. If you notice, the polls tend to tighten up right before the election. … [The pollsters] know they have to make sure their final polls before Election Day are more accurate so that no one can accuse them of being wrong or biased once the votes are counted.

Everything’s more extreme under Trump, including the bias.

 

Resist the Red Tape Impulse

Resist the Red Tape Impulse. By Danielle Wood, Chair of the Productivity Commission in Australia, at Inflection Points.

Wasn’t it easier to just get things done back in the day? As a matter of fact, it was. Our regulatory burden has grown: the number of restrictive terms in Commonwealth Acts of Parliament and legislative instruments grew dramatically in the two decades to 2020.

In practice, this looks like ever-more approval hoops to get anything done. In Brisbane, it takes 31 approval steps to open a café. Until recently, federal environmental approvals for wind energy projects could add $5 million in costs and months of delays. …

Anyone who has worked in a large business will tell you that their stock of policies and procedures grows faster than remuneration packages.

The cost to comply with all this regulation can be eye-watering. Macquarie estimated it spent $1.2 billion on compliance in 2025, up from $405 million in 2017. …

Ticking all these boxes takes time. Corporate boards devoted 55% of their time to risk and compliance issues in 2025, up from 24% in 2015. For small business owners, it means less time on the tools, and less time to think about how they might expand. …

In our major cities, for example, regulations add about $200,000 to the cost of a new house, and $90,000 to the cost of a new unit. That pushes a lot of potentially feasible developments into the ‘doesn’t stack up’ column, leading to fewer houses being built. …

On some measures, our regulatory burden has grown less than the US or Europe. …

As we get richer we buy pay more to avoid risk:

Red tape hasn’t proliferated by accident. Our changing social risk appetite drives demand for new regulations. And that demand is supercharged by our political structures, which mean more regulation is the reflex response to any crisis or thorny issue. …

As we get richer and more comfortable, we can afford to be less tolerant of risks. … This changing risk appetite manifests in greater expectations on governments to prevent and minimise harms —  more regulation.

Our demand for more and better regulation has led to positive outcomes … In 2004, there were 3 deaths per 100,000 workers; in 2024, there were 1.3 deaths per 100,000 workers. Safety regulations and interventions are associated with fewer accidents at work. …

Frenzies:

But we’re predictably irrational in the way we assess risk.
We can be swept into frenzies about risks that weren’t even on our radar before (was anyone tracking the risk of needles in strawberries before 2018?), demanding politicians ‘do something’ before a cost-benefit analysis can even get its shoes on. …

This creates asymmetric incentives. Non-existent entities — the business that didn’t get started, the granny flat that didn’t get built, the tradie who didn’t move across state lines — are by definition less visible and vocal. …

Asymmetry:

The incentive for ‘just in case’ regulations, and a cautious interpretation of those on the books, is strong. And there’s not much pull in the other direction. How many policy makers get a public commendation when they choose not to regulate?

There are a few willing to hold the line until level heads can assess the right response. …

The only recent Australian example I can recall is the South Australian premier resisting calls for an inquiry following a serious accident at the Tour Down Under. “I’m reluctant to overreact to it given that it is such a freak occurrence,” he said. If only more were willing to utter those words. …

Regulations seem like an easy response to hard problems:

Governments increasingly default to regulation when they can’t, or aren’t willing to, actually ‘solve’ a tough problem. It feels like a get-out-of-jail-free card: a way to stake out a position with minimal budgetary cost.

This is particularly evident in our growing business reporting requirements. Businesses are now required to report on slavery in their supply chains, on the climate emissions of their suppliers, and on their gender pay gaps.

Publishing information that enables customers and workers to make informed decisions might feel like an unambiguously good, even pro-market, thing to do. But, like everything, it has a cost.

How do we manage before all those regulations? Life was better, in many ways. Some easy productivity wins are possible here, surely.

Australian Government living in a net-zero fantasy

Australian Government living in a net-zero fantasy. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.

Because the Albanese government now never talks of its “net-zero” energy commitments, the IGR [Intergenerational Report] has been given a free pass for its ludicrous passages on net zero…

The IGR contains plenty of government propaganda that simply contradicts reality, such as: “Australia’s energy transition is well under way, with cleaner, cheaper, renewable energy …”

But the passages on net zero deserve special mention for they perfectly reprise one of the very worst dynamics in contemporary policy. There is a fantasy that much of the world will reach net zero by 2050, and the rest of the world not too long after. …

By pretending that what is at best an impossible aspiration is actually going to happen, the government and its subservient institutions create a toxic feedback loop of bad information that justifies terrible policy today. …

Look at what they believe:

A foundational sentence in the IGR reads: “Progress is expected to continue over the coming decades as the world continues to transition towards net-zero emissions. Around 170 countries accounting for around 80 per cent of global domestic product have adopted net-zero commitments.”

This is one of the worst sentences you could ever read in any Australian government policy document because it does not make any attempt to assess the reality of those commitments. It was never the case that the majority of the world economy was seriously committed to getting to net zero. But even the majority of the small number of countries that were taking some serious action towards that goal have now mostly backed off. …

  • China is notionally committed to net zero by 2060. That is utterly meaningless. Its emissions may have peaked as its population is now in decline and it’s using cleaner coal and some renewables. It’s still commissioning and building new coal-fired power plants and will not seriously reduce emissions for many years, if not decades. It will never go anywhere near net zero. It’s responsible for 30 per cent of global emissions.
  • The second-biggest emitter, the US, has no net-zero commitment at all.
  • Nation number three, India, has a notional commitment to net zero by 2070! Yes, 2070. India, where hundreds of millions of people need electricity, will certainly carbonise long before it thinks about decarbonising.
  • Russia has not the slightest interest in net zero.

That’s way over 50 per cent of global emissions that have no effective net-zero commitment at all — exactly the reverse of what the IGR claims, and bases Australian policy on. …

In 2025, according to the International Energy Agency, global greenhouse emissions rose, as they do every year. That’s not a world moving to net zero. …

The world will pay us? Don’t think so mate:

Aidan Morrison, energy program director at the Centre for Independent Studies, says Treasury falsely [expects] the world will pay whatever it takes to decarbonise, and therefore hugely expensive notional green exports from Australia will become competitive: “In reality, markets for expensive substitutes for carbon-based fuels and materials have not materialised. So we’re living in a fantasy world.”

And let’s not get started on how the Australian Government was hoodwinked by modern bureaucratically funded “science.” The climate models are based on an assumption about how convection and water vapor change when carbon dioxide increases. That assumption was made in 1963 when the modellers and climate scientists had simply no clue, so they made a convenient guess. By the time the empirical evidence was in, around 2005 — showing the assumption to be violently wrong — the “science” was already set in political stone.

AI has deleted the reason for universities to exist

AI has deleted the reason for universities to exist. By Superman on X.

Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms. …

They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.

One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.

The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.

The AI didn’t just win. It embarrassed the institution. Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom. They scored 30% higher on the final assessment. And they did it in less time.

Goodbye universities:

Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.

This study just proved both of those moats are gone.

When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.

The AI didn’t just give the students answers. It used strict pedagogical guardrails. It guided. It questioned. It forced the students to do the cognitive work. It offered perfect, one-to-one tutoring, personalized to the exact moment a student misunderstood a concept.

That level of attention is mathematically impossible to scale in a physical lecture hall.

For a thousand years, the university was the only place to get a premium education. Now, it’s the bottleneck.

If AI can double your learning speed for a fraction of the cost, what exactly are students taking on decades of debt to pay for?

AI is certainly a heck of a lot cheaper and much quicker, and saves on being physically present. Personally, I found the university environment invaluable for motivating me to learn things I wouldn’t have otherwise thought about.

Anyway, universities have just become finishing schools in elite attitudes, and a dating service.

What have the tech titans ever done for us?

What have the tech titans ever done for us?

Bernie Sanders:

The arrogance of the oligarchs is extraordinary. THEY WANT IT ALL.

In this election, Musk and other billionaires will spend huge amounts of money to make sure that Congress works for them — not working families.

We can beat them.

Educate. Organize. Get your friends to vote.

Robert Sterling:

What Elon Musk has done to make my life better:

– electric cars
– satellite internet
– saved free speech

What Jeff Bezos has done to make my life better:

– nationwide next-day delivery
– architecture that powers the internet

What Larry Page and Sergey Brin have done to make my life better:

– made the internet searchable
– online email and documents platform

What Mark Zuckerberg has done to make my life better:

– social media to keep me connected to friends
– online ads platform

What Larry Ellison has done to make my life better:

– database software for my businesses
– data centers for AI and cloud computing

What Jensen Huang has done to make my life better

– hardware that powers the AI revolution

What Bernie Sanders has done to make my life better:

– Absolutely nothing.

You know the reference:

Actions speak louder than words: Terrorism not so bad, stopping illegals very bad

Actions speak louder than words: Terrorism not so bad, stopping illegals very bad. By Liz Churchill.

1,000+ military-age men broke into Britain last week…

Only one person got arrested…the man who tried to stop it…

Today, the Prime Minister went on TV and called him a racist…

Daniel Thomas (aka Danny Tommo) was arrested and charged with criminal damage for slashing a dinghy in the English Channel. While the vessel was empty of migrants, a French rescue worker was on board when Thomas used a knife to puncture it, which is why the charges included suspicion of endangering life. He pleaded not guilty on September 25, 2026, was denied bail, and is remanded in custody.

And of course, among the 1,200 illegal migrants who invaded in the last two days there have been no arrests. No doubt given somewhere to stay, meals, some spending money, etc.

Commenter from the US:

We are one presidential election away from this. …

Well, one election with unchecked mail-in ballots, anyway.

 

Meanwhile, the five British nationals who were arrested over the bomb plot at RAF Fairford have been released on bail.

Basil the Great:

Anybody who thinks these terrorists are British are part of the problem. …

Nigel, you literally said on camera you believe people with British passports are British

You went on to say you hope it was only a minority of people on the right who believed they weren’t truly British

By your logic these terrorists are as British as we are.

Britain: from affluent and high-trust to broken and low-trust

Britain: from affluent and high-trust to broken and low-trust. By Andrew Fox.

British, because he had a passport. Really?

 

This story has broken me. It has unleashed a rage so strong I can barely express it, but allow me to try.

Above all, I am angry with the decades-long malevolent incompetence of the British state: politicians of all parties, the judiciary, the civil service. Their collective uselessness has shattered the social contract and made us all poorer and less safe. In just 25 years, they have led us from an affluent, high-trust society to a broken, low-trust one.

I am sickened by the growth in sectarian politics. I am appalled by the foreign ghettos in our cities and imported, bent voting practices and resultant corruption in some of our councils. I hate seeing the clothing of female oppression on our streets. I am sickened by the fact our Jewish community lives under siege.

I no longer wish to pay tax to support those who have come here illegally and should be removed immediately. It is to our shame that we have accepted mass immigration without insisting on integration.

I am tired of being told that a British passport makes a foreigner as British as me. I assure you that the “British citizen” in this story is not. I am saddened that for so many people, the concept of “British” is essentially meaningless.

I am sick of the obsession with a minor war 2,500 miles away that barely affects us. I despise that £88m of our tax money is going to Hamas (because it will), when the tax burden is a record high, everything is expensive, welfare spending is out of control and we can’t even pay for our own defences when the global risk of conflict is the highest it has been since the end of the Cold War. And in spite of how much of our money the government steals from our pockets, nothing, at all, in this country works. Healthcare, transport, education — all broken.

It is a stain on our national politics that we have five Gaza MPs. It is our national shame that our government is intent on sucking up to the Palestinian entity which contains some of the worst monsters on the face of planet. It is a disgrace that our Foreign Secretary shook the hand of the representative of the Iranian regime that has slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people, and that he doesn’t seem to understand why that photograph will damn him forever. It is embarrassing that we had a Foreign Office minister dancing with and hugging the representative of the Palestinian Authority. The lack of serious statesmanship is mind-boggling and indicative of how far we have fallen.

They say the past is a foreign country, but my goodness, do I miss the country I grew up in. I feel so sorry for the generation that grew up after 2000 and will never know how good it was. It’s not coming back. …

The worst part of it is that there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it. I just want to live in a happy, stable, prosperous country like we used to be, instead of one that is run by a state apparatus that does nothing but beat us down, obsess over irrelevances, take our money, and leave us poorer and less safe.

Fighting all the institutions

Fighting all the institutions. By Eric Weinstein.

Peter Theil asks:

What is something you feel is good and needs to be done, but on which almost no institution agrees with you and will fight to destroy you with their full force at a deeply personal level?

Eric’s answer:

Undermining faith in Anthony Fauci’s and Francis Collins’ scientific behavior during a pandemic.

Calling attention to the fact that the president of the United States with launch code responsibility was obviously demented during his presidency.

Opposing high levels of immigration for completley non-xenophobic reasons.

Openly discussing asymmetries in patterns of religious martyrdom attacks.

Fighting the loss of the word “Genocide” via coordinated social campaigns.

Pointing out that the history of Peer Review is retconned and fictitious and obviously false.

Fighting irreversible surgeries pushed on children leading to a reproductive holocaust.

Calling for an end to Diverisity-Equity-Inclusion and opposing “Black Lives Matter”, despite their branding genius, even during the Summer of Floyd.

Pointing out that conspiracies are well documented and ubiquitous and fighting for responsible conspiracy theorizing.

Promoting my own technical work and insisting that scientists get paid handsomely.

Truth seekers are rare:

You’re asking the wrong person. It seems I stand up for what I believe is deeply good and what is misperceived as evil all day, every day. This has stupidly become close to my whole life at times. I’m so bored by how silent everyone is. I can’t fathom it. “Managed Reality” has turned evil.

Something is pushing pure evil, disguised as “good” down our throats 24/7 via the institutions. And almost everyone puts up with it. I do not.

Who controls are the institutions? Why do they all move together, like fish in a school? Why are politicians who advocate political positions that were centrist and mainstream from 1990 to 2005 — such as Donald Trump, AfD, Marine Le Pen, Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage, and Pauline Hanson — damned as “far right” and Nazi adjacent by all the institutions in the 2020s? Who decided to simultaneously weaken all white countries by mass migration from the third world?

We don’t pay no stinkin’ reparations

We don’t pay no stinkin’ reparations. By Daniel Hannan.

I’ve had enough of these grifters. If another government comes whining for slavery reparations from the country [Britain] that distinguished itself by its relentless global abolitionism, we should treat it as a hostile act and respond with economic sanctions.

John Cleese.

This is where the Arabs were ahead of us

By castrating all their slaves, they made sure that there were no descendants who could claim reparations

John Carter:

The lesson of the long twentieth century is that mercy gets you nowhere. You will pay for it forever. No one gives the Arabs a hard time about the slave trade, because the Arabs made sure there were no descendants of slaves. No one gives the Argentines a hard time about stolen land, because the indigenous peoples of Argentina were systematically eliminated. No one gives the Japanese a hard time about the Ainu, because there are no Ainu.

Video on western civilization

Video on western civilization. By the Claude AI. Pure eye-candy, but fun.

 

Now watch tv nowadays:

What is to be built for the Australian Navy?

What is to be built for the Australian Navy? By David Archibald.

The premise of the book Building Australia’s Defence is that while the situation is dire and the hour is late, it is still recoverable. …

China:

China has taken upon itself to be the main vector of death and destruction during this century. Thirty years ago they realised that their peak relative strength would be in the 2020s. That window of opportunity is running out. Their problem is that the advances in electronics over the last 25 years have favoured the defence.

Another problem is that their ancestors have already conquered the easy stuff, going out from the original Han heartland in Shaanxi Province. There is frozen wasteland to the north, deserts to the west and mountain ranges to the south. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was easy by comparison, with thousands of kilometres of flat land to drive across in armoured formations. To go anywhere, China has to put its troops in metal containers — ships and aircraft — which are easily detected and tracked on the modern battlefield.

It has been said that the cost in ordnance of sinking a ship, with cruise and ballistic missiles, is about five percent of the cost of building it. It doesn’t matter that China now has the world’s largest navy by hull count, because the cost of sinking them is a small fraction of the cost of building them. Ukraine is inspirational in this regard for, even without a navy, it has driven the Russian Navy to the eastern end of the Black Sea. A recent campaign saw Ukraine destroy over 300 Russian commercial vessels using drones. …

And Australia?

The most cost-effective way to sink warships now is with air-launched ballistic missiles. Radar systems on ships have a blind spot vertically above them in a cone about six degrees wide. That is the weak spot to be exploited. The US developed the PrSM missile, with a range of 500 km, to be the successor to the ATACMS missile. It weighs one tonne, and has a 90 kg warhead. Air-launching a missile doubles its range. Another rule of thumb is that with a warhead that is 10% to 20% of the missile weight, you will get a range of one kilometre per kilo of mass. Increment two of the PrSM missile was developed to enable the US Army to sink ships at sea. It has passive guidance with an infrared, image-matching seeker, combined with radio frequency detection (the target ship’s radar is effectively a location beacon). …

Unfortunately Australia doesn’t have any aircraft that can launch a two-tonne missile. The psychotic people running the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) buried the ones that could, our F-111s, in a pit.

But civilian aircraft could be converted to that purpose and would not come in harm’s way, given the stand-off range of the missile. For sinking ships, air-launched ballistic missiles are far more cost-effective than submarines. While a submarine might take weeks to complete a mission, an aircraft could service targets in the Indian Ocean one day and targets in the Pacific the next. Every Chinese ship in the Pacific and Indian Oceans needs to be sunk, including their fishing fleet. To sink a 500 tonne fishing vessel takes a 50 kg warhead.

The countries around the South China Sea will help. The Philippines and Indonesia have acquired the Brahmos supersonic, antiship missile from India, and Malaysia is evaluating it. Indonesia is particularly important, given that it is a belt 5,200 km long across the path between China and Australia. If Indonesia doesn’t want a Chinese armada to pass, then the Chinese armada will be heavily chewed up in attempting to do so. Fortunately China and Indonesia have recently had a falling out, with China dismantling US$14 billion worth of nickel production lines in Indonesia in response to an Indonesian hike in its take. …

The Virginia class submarines are a positive development. However, the Australian Government didn’t increase the defence budget to pay for them. Instead, it took funds from some 500 other projects, in effect hollowing out the ADF and making it more fragile. For example, Australia recently acquired 75 Abrams tanks that are fitted for, but not with, the Trophy system. So they are naked against ATGMs. On the other hand they don’t have protection against drones either, so they are useless anyway.

Hold a globe so that you are looking directly at Australia, and you’ll see Australia and ocean, and not much else. Australia is the nearest significant nation to about a quarter of the world’s oceans. Yet our navy is minuscule and outdated.

As of late 2025 and 2026, Australia’s merchant fleet has shrunk to only 20 Australian-flagged ships, most of them coastal traders, a dramatic decline from over 100 ships three decades ago. There are only four ocean-going, Australian-flagged ships actually engaged substantially in international trade. The decline is attributed to the high costs — due to union rules — of operating Australian-flagged and crewed ships compared to foreign-flagged alternatives, which carry the vast majority (99%) of Australia’s seaborne trade.

We have no Australian-controlled tanker fleet capable of sustaining energy imports, no fleet of bulk carriers able to guarantee critical commodity flows and almost no Australian-flagged vessels trading internationally that could be directed toward national priorities in a crisis

Read all of David’s article, covering land and air forces, here.

Matriarchies fail: How building women’s  self esteem is killing us

Matriarchies fail: How building women’s  self esteem is killing us. By Devon Eriksen.

The worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman is to convince her she’s as good as any man.

This torture is lifelong, unendurable, and once you set up the initial conditions, the pain becomes self-inflicted.

You see, women are genetically programmed for two things. First, to raise children. Second, to select a man who is superior to her to bear those children for.

Not equal. Certainly not lesser. Superior.

There is no point in arguing about this. It is obviously true to anyone who looks around himself without blinders made of wishful thinking.

There is no point in becoming angry at me or anyone else about this. It is true whether I wish it to be or not, and whether you wish it to be or not.

There is no point in trying to talk women out of this. It is not a part of their culture or education. It is not an individual character flaw in them. It is part of their genetic recipe.

Therefore, if you convince a woman she is equal to most men, she will only be willing to bear children to a small percentage of exceptional men.

If you convince her that she is the equal of any man, she will be unwilling to start a family with anyone.

And she will remain genetically programmed to do so.

Biasing schools and work to favor women raised their self esteem, but made courtship and babies impossible for many:

When I was a child, and again when I was a young man, in high school and college, I noticed that the older adults who staffed the education system seemed to think “girls’ self-esteem” was our most precious resource …

Perhaps they thought half of humanity’s potential Newtons, Einsteins, and Da Vincis were hidden among the ranks of the fair sex, waiting to be unlocked by “Project Self Esteem”, and no, I did not make that name up. …

Self-esteem is not being happy. Self-esteem is not even feeling good. Self-esteem is how awesome you think you are.

And if you think you’re awesome, when you’re mediocre, then you’re miserable, because everyone around you treats you a whole lot worse than you think you deserve.

High self-esteem is great for young men. It makes them take risks. And to thrive men need to take risks, and achieve things, for many reasons, one of which is that women only mate up.

High self-esteem is not so good for young women. It doesn’t get them anything they wouldn’t have already had. It just makes them less happy with it.

Sure, there’s such a thing as self-esteem too low, but if a woman can look you in the eye, instead of in the shoes, when she talks to you, she’s pretty much good to go.

Anything more than that is superfluous at best, and at worst… well, eyeball the video for a moment and you’ll see what I mean.

 

 

But the misery isn’t just personal.

This is the fertility crisis in a nutshell. We, Western civilization, have spent the past five or six decades telling little boys that they are worthless sacks of protoplasm, and telling little girls that the sun shines out of their collective girl parts.

And look what’s happened.

The fertility crisis is stupidly simple. When you elevate the status of women by giving them a greater share of respect, and of society’s wealth, which is created by men, they refuse to have children.

You can reverse this by allowing men to keep the wealth they create, instead of giving it to women.

Then they will give it to women themselves, but the women will look up to them, and there will be children again.

Concrete problems:

During the Trump administration so far, 94% of new jobs went to women. This is not natural or organic. This doesn’t happen on its own. This is not happening because women are “crushing it”.

Women are the same women they have always been, risk averse, clustered around average intelligence, prone to wait for others to lead.

This is not an accident. This is spin on the ball. Women vote. And pandering is an easy way to get those votes.

But give a moderately pretty one a single email job at a Silicon Valley startup, and pretty soon she thinks that the father of her children should be a “post-economic” jet-setter with the body of a professional athlete who ticks all the boxes her therapist thinks are important.

And she thinks she can pick him off a shelf at age 35.

This is a vote, conscious or not, willing or not, for the extinction of humanity.

 

There are now more women than men working in the U.S. Over the past year, working-age men have LOST jobs, while women have captured virtually 100% of the net new jobs:

 

 

A fact that everyone should know, but sadly do not:

Throughout the genetic history of humanity, approximately 80% of women had children, as opposed to 37% of men. Those numbers don’t lie. Most men either weren’t exceptional enough to breed, or died trying to become exceptional enough to breed.

Women just had to not be in the bottom quintile. Not to be horrible, or horribly unlucky.

Which societies succeed?

And this is why Western civilization told women they were the weaker sex, the dumber sex, the more fragile sex. Why Eve was said to made to serve Adam.

Because this preserved civilization and the species.

Women were actually happier that way, because women don’t want to win. They want a winner.

But even if it didn’t, what choice would we have?

The only nations and tribes in the world which are still breeding are the ones where women are still of low status. And if you try to replace Westerners with them, try to make them into Westerners, not only will you fail, but even if you succeed, they’ll stop breeding, too.

And we know now why there are no matriarchies. Its not because men have superior strength, and enslaved women with violence. It’s because matriarchies don’t breed.

Humans are an animal, like any other animal. Every animal has mating rituals, and if those rituals can’t be conducted, there will be no next generation. This is why some animals can be bred in zoos, and others cannot.

We know what’s wrong. We just lack the political will to fix it. Because it’s “not fair”.

Well, of course it’s not fair. But look around you. Look at the universe. Look at history. Whatever made you expect that things would be fair?

Reality isn’t woke.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

The Devon Erikson flame war is not the usual WR standard. I feel compelled to write. …

In the end some women have to be smart enough to tell the 160 IQ guys from the 140 ones, or what is the point of all that sexual selection? Men wouldn’t be writing sonnets to impress the girls if the women didn’t have some choice, and if they weren’t smart enough to pick the better sonnet. …

The “only 37% of men have children line” is a junk statistic.

ChatGPT:

Perhaps one-third or so of all males ever born became fathers. That isn’t necessarily because vast numbers of adult men were excluded from reproduction. A huge fraction of historical male births died before reproductive age.  …

For all human history:

  • Adult females becoming mothers: ~88%
  • Adult males becoming fathers: perhaps ~70–80%

So the sex difference is real, but probably nowhere near the often-repeated idea that only a small minority of prehistoric men reproduced.

The author treats all women as the same, not acknowledging the many exceptions, and far from sympathetic. So jarring! Where as men are frequently treated this way by the current culture — as toxic and dumb — and we are so used to it.