The Liberal Party still mouthing uniparty waffle on Net Zero. By Joanne Nova.

Polls in the AFR today point to a wipe-out of the old centre-right. … One Nation could win a blockbuster tally of between 46 and 59 seats in the Australian Parliament. The Liberal Party would be reduced to between 7 to 21 seats and the Nationals to zero.

 

It’s the Blob versus The People, but the Liberals are on the Blob’s side. One Nation voters know this is a fight for the country against corruption and globalist power, and they’re hardly going to be won over by a team that says they’ll stick with the UN because they’re a bit busy. What is Angus Taylor thinking?

The Coalition’s half-pregnant policy position is that Net Zero absolutely has to go, but the Paris Agreement absolutely has to stay. … There is no principle here except something else is going on and the Liberals don’t want to tell us what it is. …

The difference between Net Zero and Paris is mere wordplay:

Senator Malcolm Roberts of One Nation explains that “No, Angus Taylor & Matt Canavan, it is not just ‘a piece of paper’”. That’s just a word game, and it’s clear the spirit and intent of Net Zero lives in there.

The phrase ‘Net Zero’ was deliberately left out of the Paris Agreement, as it was deemed too politically charged. Instead, they inserted the legal definition of Net Zero into Article 4.1:

“Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible … so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century…”

According to Onassis, Farhana Yamin is credited with ‘getting the goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050 into the 2015 Paris Agreement’ and was a key IPCC architect. She later joined Extinction Rebellion. Even Wikipedia says, ‘Net Zero was basic to the goals of the Paris Agreement’ with the IPCC’s follow-up to Paris, the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5*C, popularising Net Zero as a short-hand for the phrase already used in the original document. …

The Paris Agreement is a legal tool to pave the way to cement the intent in domestic legislation. …

China was caught funding eco-lawfare suits in the USA to sabotage American energy dominance. Do we want to make it easier?

The UN has told Australia (but not China) that digging up our own gas might be a breach of “international law”. In another instance, a Blobocrat Court has ruled that perfect weather is a “human right”.

Even if the UN hasn’t succeeded yet in legally bombing a nation back to the stone age, we know it wants to. …

Suggestion for the Liberal Party:

If the Liberals keep pushing these contradictory messages which are obviously hiding their true intent, they look weak. If they are just doing this so the Liberals in Teal seats have a safety line, it isn’t worth it. Give the Teal voters the full force of the UN quagmire and failures and the fence sitters will be all yours.

This is the sort of Uniparty waffle that will lose even more voters to One Nation.

Probably not related. Ms Nova included this picture in her blogpost, but I don’t really get it. Something to do with sea level rise? The uniparty net zero monster? Anyway, it looked cool so here you are:

UPDATE: Joanne says it’s the Paris agreement, green on the outside but sick and deadly on the inside. Or something.

Social media and Modern Politics. By Toby Ralph in The Australian. Toby Ralph is a marketer and researcher specialising in persuasion. He has worked on more than 50 elections globally.

Politics, like retail, pornography and organised religion, has gone where the eyeballs are, and they are now permanently staring at phones…

While a television commercial for a political party might reach everybody watching the footy, a social media campaign can reach divorced men aged 38 to 54 in outer suburban Queensland who own a HiLux, dislike immigration, watch hunting videos and are three mortgage repayments away from joining a populist uprising. This excites vote hunters. …

One reason that One Nation is succeeding:

One Nation succeeds because grievance is the native language of social media. Outrage engages and persuades faster than policy, and anger shares better than nuance. Platforms built to maximise engagement inevitably reward emotional intensity, tribalism and conflict. A furious man recording a rant from inside his ute will usually outperform a carefully researched Treasury explanation delivered by some bloke in a navy blazer standing in front of three Australian flags. …

The article omits that the main reason for the rise of One Nation is that One Nation is the only party offering what most people want right now. Immigration has become the biggest issue now, and One Nation are the only party credibly offering to severely curb it. Ditto Net Zero.

If One Nation’s vote was rising merely because it aired grievances on social media, why didn’t it do better from 2010 onwards after social media started? Because immigration has only become a huge, obvious problem in the last few years, as Albanese imports two million more voters from the third world, and Bondi etc.. Duh.

The audience:

Most persuadable voters aren’t political obsessives. Persuasion in politics involves seducing people who actively don’t want to engage with politics.

They don’t spend evenings reading policy papers or debating economic theory. They distrust politicians, avoid ideological intensity and would generally prefer not to think about government at all. Many wouldn’t vote if they could avoid the fine and are more concerned with who’s rooting who on Married At First Sight and how to stop the bank repossessing the ­family SUV. …

Persuasion works at the soft edge of credibility, by finding a belief and pushing it further until it converts to behavioural change. That distinction is increasingly lost in Australian politics. …

Farrer by-election lesson:

A recent example was the Farrer by-election, where One Nation secured a landslide victory despite massive activist spending against it. GetUp reportedly spent around $600,000 campaigning in the seat, saturating digital platforms with highly researched advertising, focus-grouped messaging and sophisticated targeting. Then despite starting as equal favourites, they lost badly.

Their operation was a success. The patient died. Partly because the messenger was wrong. In many regional and outer suburban electorates, organisations like GetUp are viewed not as grassroots movements but as manifestations of precisely the urban elite voters feel already dominate political attention. The campaign unintentionally reinforced the very grievance structures One Nation thrives upon.

Focus groups fail — the “shy Tory” effect:

But there was another problem. The research itself was manifestly misleading, for it suggested all was fine, the messaging was right and the independent was in the box seat, yet they no longer were.

Modern research suffers from a fundamental flaw. It relies upon people honestly articulating what they believe in artificial environments surrounded by strangers. Focus groups produce what psychologists politely call social desirability bias, and what normal people recognise as people bullshitting because they don’t want to look bad in front of others. …

In the groups they unconsciously conform, moderate controversial opinions and mirror perceived social expectations, then consultants charge enormous sums reporting data generated by Peter and Peggy from Penrith who were probably fibbing and may not even fully understand their own motivations.

The political class readily mistake articulated opinion for actual behaviour, particularly if it suits their internal narrative. We saw misleading focus group research during the Indigenous voice referendum, the federal election and again in Farrer.

How to measure opinions when they might be “disapproved of” (i.e anti-globaslist):

My preferred methodology is much cruder and, I’d argue, more useful. Stimulus boards combined with one-on-one intercept interviews conducted in pubs, shopping centres, cafes and cinema foyers with people who haven’t been recruited to have an opinion and therefore don’t feel obligated to manufacture one.

You get very different, deeper answers when an ­individual isn’t trapped in a fluorescent-lit room with others, trying to impress earnest sociology graduates. …

Social media politics is simpler and dumber:

This is how information is now consumed by people under 40.

Social media has profoundly transformed the structure of political communication because in the Attention Economy it has altered the mechanics of human attention itself. Before persuading voters, politicians must first avoid being scrolled past while somebody explains five secret tricks to hacking airline loyalty programs.

That fundamentally advantages simplicity, emotion and conflict.

Many politicians still approach social media as though they are filming a workplace safety induction video from 2007. Those succeeding understand the platforms reward speed, emotional clarity and conversational tone. …

The mistake political professionals repeatedly make is assuming complexity performs well online. It doesn’t. Content that cuts through is usually emotionally understandable within three seconds.

Which is terrible news for anybody hoping social media might usher in a golden age of reflective democratic debate. Instead, politics increasingly competes within a giant algorithmic entertainment slurry alongside influencers, comedians, gambling advertisements, fitness coaches, Only Fans wannabes, pseudo-intellectual podcasts and a never-ending industrial conveyor belt of attention-seeking opportunists. …

Social media platforms disproportionately reward emotional grievance, outsider identity and anti-establishment sentiment. Traditional parties still partly communicate as though voters are citizens deliberating thoughtfully upon the national interest.

Well aren’t you a dinosaur, reading a site like this 🙂

Socialism: entrepreneurs leave, welfare increases, debt explodes, money printing is inevitable. By Michael Arouet.

This is what happens when left policies alienate UK entrepreneurs and cause 45 of them to emigrate every day, while lavish permanent welfare demotivates people from working, adding 3,000 new welfare recipients every day.

 

The ABC fans the flames of hatred in Australia. By Chris Kenny in The Australian.

The crisis of antisemitism in this country and the rest of the Western world cannot reasonably be assessed without reference to the media dynamics that have helped create an environment of anti-Israel sentiment. …

Commissioner Virginia Bell [Albanese’s woke choise to head the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, after the Bondi massacre] cannot ignore the role of the ABC, SBS and other media if she is to seriously examine the fomenting of antisemitism and pay due respect to the submissions before her. …

Downplaying the genocidal barbarity of Hamas on Oct. 7:

Former foreign correspondent for The Age and senior producer for CNN Augustine Zycher … details how the ABC and SBS have “displayed a pattern of omitting critical reporting and evidence about the Conflict-Related Sexual Violence war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Hamas”. …

“When you remove the full truth about the massacre and the sexual violence, the reasons for the conflict become distorted, it is no longer presented as a war instigated by Hamas with a barbaric assault on Israeli civilians.”

Instead of the war being perceived as Israel’s effort to defeat Hamas and free hostages, the distorted coverage promotes the Hamas propaganda narrative about a war against Palestinian ­civilians. “This has effectively contributed to the demonisation of ­Israel and Jews,” her submission contends. “It directly feeds the hate expressed in weekly demonstrations and propaganda against Israel and ‘Zionists’.” …

Playing the sympathy card for their side:

Katherine Mannix is a former senior researcher for ABC Television … identified how relentless coverage of the war has been reduced to “human interest” coverage. “The ‘human interest’ shown invariably involved dead Palestinian children, distraught Palestinian mothers and those allegedly starving, with commentary that primarily described that suffering.

“There is an argument for human interest stories, but not in the news and not consistently from one side during a war,” Mannix explains. “In effectively presenting Hamas’ case to the Australian public on a nightly basis, while seeking the appearance of objectivity, ABC news reporters contributed to an environment where Jews were portrayed not as the victims but the victimisers, the genocidal murderers of children.” …

Lying by omission:

She detailed, with supportive evidence, how Hamas had infiltrated aid agencies and distorted coverage, including through staged photographs promoting the starvation narrative. “There was ample evidence that the claims of starvation were overstated, and that hunger in Gaza was more to do with Hamas’s looting than Israeli actions,” says Mannix.

You would not know these facts if you only watched, read or listened to the ABC. Remember, the national broadcaster ran that absurdly implausible and completely erroneous claim that 14,000 babies would die within 48 hours in Gaza unless Israel supplied immediate aid (it later corrected this damaging nonsense). …

Supporting Islam:

“There is no doubt that the ABC’s biased, hate-filled news coverage over the last two years gave significant assistance to the dreadful cause of Islamic extremism, to its adherents, and to its unthinking local followers.”

Other people who have made submissions on these themes prefer to remain anonymous. One of them, a member of the Jewish community, eloquently expresses how the public status of the ABC and SBS gives them disproportionate authority –- so that “When they repeatedly frame Jewish communal concerns as political lobbying, Zionism as a morally suspect identity, Israeli self-defence as presumptively illegitimate, and antisemitism as self-inflicted or secondary to other forms of racism, those frames move from ­radical activist discourse into mainstream Australian society”. …

The response?

Against the weight of this evidence, the submission from ABC Alumni seems puny, intellectually constrained and self-serving. …

it does not explain why Russians are not pilloried on our streets for their army’s actions in Ukraine. Nor are Chinese Australians pilloried for People’s Liberation Army persecution of Uighurs and Buddhists.

The ABC coordinates the left and wokeness in this country. So the leftists all know that the place to be publicly is to be anti-Israeli and to call Gaza a genocide. Tax dollars well spent?? How long will the ABC last under a Hanson-supported government?

Multiple stabbings last night in Melbourne, this is everyday now. By Lozzy B.

My friend whose young son who has a knife pulled on him twice now just walking around our community just sent me this.

Multiple stabbings last night in Melbourne, this is everyday now.

Kidnappings, shootings, stabbings, fire bombings, r*pes & assaults by foreigners & foreign gangs.

3 young people have already been horrifically murdered by foreigners in my community alone.

My friend whose young son who has a knife pulled on him twice now just walking around our community just sent me this.

Multiple stabbings last night in Melbourne, this is everyday now.

Kidnappings, shootings, stabbings, fire bombings, r*pes & assaults by foreigners & foreign… pic.twitter.com/HhEXZ0n8JQ

— Lozzy B 🇦🇺𝕏 (@TruthFairy131) May 23, 2026

Which political policy is responsible? Perhaps it should be changed?

Our ruling class spends huge sums of our money because of a feared rise in air temperature in Melbourne (i.e. climate change). I’ll bet the number of stabbings in Melbourne per day are rising MUCH, MUCH faster than the air temperature.

The builders of MAGA, fighting back against the corrupt aristocrats. By Elizabeth Nickson from Absurdistan.

I am a Borderer down to my socks, which is the most populous of the four founding Anglo-Saxon races in Canada and the U.S. according to the magisterial Albions Seed. And by far, of all the northern clans, the most primitive, violent fighters for self-determination in the world.

Borderers are the reason that the American south is the place where everyone wants to live now. And Borderers are why the American cowboy west is still free and fighting. They founded both cultures; so desperate and degraded, one-third died on the voyage. Our clans, the most common Anglo names in both countries, were so ruined by the Crown, their lands overrun with one war after another, they became known as the fiercest fighters in Europe for several hundred years. They had no choice. Theirs were the first surnames not drawn from a profession, a lord, a village. They were known as The Names, and they had fought for their sliver of independence for five hundred years. As a result, never bet against a northern Brit, and I include the Irish in this. This splinter off the human race is more responsible for freedom, innovation, creativity and to-the-moon or bust energy than any other. They are the root of MAGA.

They — the Oligarchy of Europe — buried this culture, and imposed their own decadent, materialist, promiscuous, status-obsessed garbage culture, weakening us, hiding the fact that every advance in human civilization came from us, not them. We fought them for 1000 years while they consolidated power and stole everything not nailed down. Then we created the New World and they came after us wanting what we had built. … The innovations came from ordinary people, not the aristocrats.

 

 

For translation, it starts north of border country, where the Industrial Revolution took root to include the Scots, of course, and extends through northern Europe to Germany. Do you know who these people are? Engineers. Builders. Tinkerers in garages. They built our world. Where they are not, chaos reigns. When my Nicksons crawled out of their clannish, violent, elemental culture, they built….

US today:

We are looking at the restoration of that spirit. The redistricting decision by the Supreme Court ensures a conservative future, with as many as another 30 Republican seats, which means that party might finally stand up and fight for their voters instead of selling out to the highest bidder. Equally, people, creative, industrious, disciplined people are leaving the blue states’ crime and high taxes as soon as they can figure out how. Mamdani managed to see off $6 billion from Ken Griffin, the Citadel CEO, this week which signifies the bitter end for New York as a center of anything but crime and sewage. Every generation, it seems, has to learn the bitter fruits of Marxism. The further left you travel along the continuum, the more mentally ill you are. Far left? 59% with a mental illness. Which explains George Soros’s challenged circus children on the streets.

In Indiana, populists took seven seats from RINOs and the primaries are showing a MAGA surge, not a break. The cheating has not been fixed yet, but the supervision will be close and only the reckless will dare. And we will catch them. Ten thousand Americans are working to ‘true’ the vote. Daily.

Africa:

All across Africa, people are starting to say, we made a mistake when we got rid of whitey, as they watch their infrastructure, built by whitey, collapse, observe the once gleaming streets of Jo’burg and Narobi turn to garbage dumps. The Canadian doctor and nurse who bought my first house here built the entire hospital system of Zambia under Bush’s Millennium Project.

Builders:

As a ‘race’, we are wildly compassionate and giving. As well as being the strain of fighters and builders who built the governments of the west and ran them until the socialists began to weasel their way in. Before? Solvent. Real growth and human happiness. After? Bankruptcy and misery, except for the decadent, deeply repellent clients of the regime.

The decision to turn power over to the intellectual class (thank you Walter Lippman) was the biggest mistake of the past 100 years. Intellectuals cannot build a chicken coop. They cannot platte a neighborhood, they cannot devise a health system, they cannot turn out educated kids. Everything they touch turns to corruption and disarray.

Engineers are my people; all through my family, 75% of the kids are studying engineering. Engineers are relatively inarticulate. We let the intellectual class run over us, and tell us they knew better because they went to Oxbridge or Harvard and could talk pretty. …

That’s over. Everywhere. The next 20 years is going to be a purge of every bit of that corruption. …

Rebuilding:

It is a marker of the ‘white’ race’s enormous compassion that we have let all these incompatible races into our countries, and allowed them to steal, rape, plunder and slice the heads off priests and toddlers from Vienna to Eugene, Oregon. Deportation and remigration are the primary issue in the U.S. midterms by 15 points. Across Europe and the U.K., remigration is primary. Scandinavia is even deporting Muslims with citizenship because they refuse to stop their primitive rites and customs.

It’s the great spitting out. Reclaiming western civilization is not coming from the universities, the intelligentsia, it’s coming from the kids. In exit polls, under 40’s are conservative, not liberal. …

It’s the culture.

We are Scots, Brits to the core, we are disciplined, and marinated in 20 generations of a fierce, fierce, often ecstatic northern Christianity, unlinked to any repressive Church system. Frontier faith was drawn from a dangerous world where just one mistake could kill everyone within reach. The frontier is where — contrary to Hollywood filth — virtue became an absolute necessity and I have the receipts on that. The natives who married into us were trained as we were. That culture, rigorous, even harsh and driven to accomplishment rather than vulgar “success” is not isolated to us. It is, or can be universal. If adopted, the individual, family, culture and country will soar.

Evil Queen Maxima of the Netherlands. By David Archibald.

In the English-speaking world, we are mostly familiar with the work of Dr Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in progressing the depopulation agenda of the degenerate elite — his early years of trying to cause heart disease with a corona virus, inclusion of bits of the HIV genome in the early 2000s, the shift to Wuhan, supplying mice with humanised ACE2 receptors and so on.

Dr Baric — proud of his creation, covid — has been recorded on a zoom meeting gloating over how many people it will kill. …

It wasn’t a solo effort though. A big breakthrough in making a more transmissible virus, and thus allowing a lower case-fatality rate, was provided by a Dutch team led by one Ron Fouchier. His team of virologists at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam “under the veil of ‘scientific progress’ built viruses with the explicit aim to reduce the world’s population.” In 2010, Fouchier and his team worked on upgrading the SARS virus but could not achieve the crucial gain of function-breakthrough. In 2011, they switched to working on the most deadly avian influenza, H5N1, to make it airborne and thus transmissible from human to human. They achieved this by using genes from another avian virus, N7H7.

Fouchier’s work was also funded by the US National Institutes of Health. According to the Dutch newspaper report, in 2012,

Fouchier and his team scored another gain of function-victory with MERS.

The reporter goes on to say:

There is one important final point to be made here that maybe points toward the deeper origins of the depopulation-policy of the factory of death in Rotterdam. All the main players involved — Ab Osterhaus, Marion Koopman, Ron Fouchier — were decorated with the highest honours by our royal family.

Our Queen Maxima works closely together with Bill Gates on many fronts and her office in New York with the UN is financed by Gates. Her husband, our King Willem, participated in the Bilderberg meeting of 2025 together with Pfizer’s CEO Alfred Bourla to discuss depopulation. All the appearances are there that the factory of death in Rotterdam is protected and supported by very powerful forces.

 

Queen Maxima of the Netherlands

 

Six years into the pandemic, what news of Baric and Fouchier’s creation? The news is getting worse. A team at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas sampled wastewater at 40 sites across Texas for the presence of oncogenic viruses from 2022. These viruses may cause 20% of cancer incidence. The samples contained all the main oncogenic viruses known to date, including HPV, hepatitis B and C viruses, cancer-associated polyomaviruses, Epstein-Barr virus and the herpesvirus linked to Kaposi’s sarcoma. Here’s the important bit:

The researchers also observed a significant increase in the presence of several oncogenic viruses over the three years of monitoring. In particular, HPV, Epstein-Barr virus and some polyomaviruses showed marked rises after 2024.

If the incidence of these cancer-causing viruses is increasing, that means that immunity in the population is being suppressed by persistent covid infections. My advice is to get your lymphocyte panel done for CD4, CD8, NK cells etc. Because if there is a need for intervention, the sooner that starts, the better. It is better to suppress a virus than an incipient cancer.

How Islam is taking over Melbourne. By Jason Thomas in The Spectator.

Before entering a village in Afghanistan or any other uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment I have worked in across Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, it was good to know two things, if nothing else. Those villages who liked you and those who hated you. Knowing where you stand is reassuring. It is never pleasant being in a village where you have no idea how the leaders of that village feel. They are probably the ones where the village leaders will make you tea in the day and slit your throats at night….

That’s where a good Human Terrain assessment helps. This was the framework used by Western forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to understand local power structures, nodes of influence and population dynamics.

When applied to Victoria, it exposes a state providing a permissive sanctuary for the global Islamist insurgency. And this has enabled the Islamist extremist networks to secure significant sway over key political, security and religious nodes across Melbourne and its suburbs.

For example:

The arrival of Isis brides and their families to Melbourne in early May underscores the problem. These women were not innocent bystanders but willing participants in a barbaric regime responsible for slavery, beheadings and unimaginable cruelty; the same mindset that committed the 7 October 2023 massacre in Israel. Met at the airport by committed Islamist supporters, their return reveals how deeply entrenched the network has become in parts of Victoria. And it was evident this Islamist leadership and their network have zero to fear in the state of Victoria. It’s why you can call Victoria a permissive environment.

Where Victoria is at:

In Victoria, Islamist groups have mastered modern irregular low-intensity conflict by increasingly dominating the human terrain. As Thomas X. Hammes explained in The Sling and the Stone, fourth-generation conflict leverages all available political, social, economic and military networks to convince decision-makers that continued resistance is too costly. Far better to cultivate networks within your enemy’s system.

 

This is precisely what we see playing out now. Political nodes have been effectively captured. Organisations such as the Muslim Vote celebrate their ability to decide outcomes in marginal seats and pressure governments into adopting positions aligned with Islamist priorities, while ministers actively conform to the Islamists’ position. Federal and Victorian authorities, in turn, direct taxpayer funds toward institutions and community bodies, often labelled ‘social cohesion’ and ‘multicultural’ projects while avoiding scrutiny of the ideologies being promoted.

Fear of being labelled Islamophobic has paralysed political resolve, turning feeble, acquiescence into standard practice. This is infiltration dressed up as diversity. In 2014 the UAE Foreign Minister, Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, warned in future there would be far more Islamist radicals and terrorists coming from the West than from anywhere else.

Security institutions find themselves in an increasingly difficult position. Earlier operations exposed radicalisation networks in Melbourne, yet many of the same environments continue to operate with limited interference. …

The state is no longer shaping the human environment — the insurgents are shaping the state’s behaviour through persistent advocacy, education, street mobilisations and legal pressure.

The religious nodes lie at the centre of this sanctuary. A network of influential imams, Islamic associations and educational programmes exerts commanding authority over a rapidly expanding and geographically concentrated population. In too many cases, these institutions advance messages of Western hostility, historical grievance and solidarity with designated terrorist organisations.

This decentralised approach aligns with the strategy once outlined by al-Qaeda theorist Abu Musab al-Suri — spreading the ideology like a virus through everyday community structures. These religious and cultural centres function as the decisive terrain where loyalty to Australian values is contested and often eroded. No physical caliphate is required when one can be constructed suburb by suburb through influence and indoctrination.

Decades of lax immigration screening, generous refugee policies, chain migration and elevated birth rates have altered the demographic balance in key Victorian areas. The result is the emergence of parallel societies where sharia-influenced norms coexist uneasily with Australian law, antisemitism has been normalised, and there is no allegiance to the host nation. The open celebration of returning Isis associates demonstrates how confident these networks have grown.

Who could have foreseen this? Only warned by 1,400 years of Islamic history, current middle eastern leaders, and the Koran. But our political leaders were either blinded by the votes or paralyzed by fear of being called a racist.

Our socialist government is turning Australia into a low-growth, high-yield defensive sidenote. By Roger Montgomery in The Australian.

The Albanese government has delivered the most aggressive restructuring of wealth incentives this country has seen in a generation. …

Growth and innovation:

High-income earners and fund managers will look at a high-growth tech stock or a mid-cap disrupter and realise the tax drag on their eventual exit is now significantly higher. Why take on the binary risk of capital growth when the government takes a much larger bite of any upside, which, by the way, isn’t guaranteed? Reliable, franked dividend yields instantly become the path of least resistance.

That might sound OK at first, but it pours petrol on the problem of the ASX’s historic underperformance compared to the US. Australia’s dividend imputation system has long incentivised companies to return profits to shareholders to pass on franking credits, rather than retaining those profits to fund R&D or global scaling. By making capital growth even less tax-effective for individuals, this budget doubles down on Australia’s structural bias. It essentially tells the market to stop trying to build the next global tech or medical giant, and instead allocate capital right back into banks, miners, and legacy infrastructure. It entrenches the ASX as a low-growth, high-yield defensive sidenote. …

Housing:

Because existing properties are grandfathered, current investors will simply refuse to sell. Selling means giving up a precious, and now extinct, tax shelter, while facing a harsher CGT regime on whatever asset they buy next. Transaction volumes on established homes will dry up, choking market liquidity. …

The result? With fewer private landlords buying established rentals and a massive influx of new residents, rents will skyrocket. The ironic, tragic third-order effect is that the young people this policy claims to assist will be utterly crushed in the rental market long before they can ever save enough for a home deposit.

Wasting time restructuring because tax law changed:

Elsewhere, the introduction of a 30 per cent minimum tax on discretionary trust income directly attacks how small-to-medium enterprises and family business groups manage risk, succession, and working capital. Consequently, tens of thousands of family businesses will spend the next two years seeking valuations, burning time, focus, and capital engaging in otherwise needless restructuring.

This is effectively a tax on productivity. When business owners and investors are forced to focus on tax compliance rather than growing, innovating, or hiring, the economy stalls. …

Talent walks:

It’s sad that Australia has always struggled to keep its brightest entrepreneurs from fleeing to Silicon Valley, Turkey or Singapore. And those who have already left, are now even less likely to return. Other countries will be the beneficiaries of the new businesses they create. That’s because the simple fact is the combination of high personal income tax rates and a penalised capital gains structure destroys the incentive to build a business locally.

Albanese and (almost?) the entire Labor parliamentary team have no experience in private industry or building a business. Their lived experience is of negotiating a share of the money taken from taxpayers by coercion, or a wage paid by an employer who takes the risk of business failure.

Why the left can’t be funny. By Aimee Terese.

The strongest red flag was when leftists lost the ability to be funny.

Comedy relies on subverting expectations to expose truth. Leftism subverts the truth to peddle lies. That’s why they can’t be funny, they can’t reveal the truth, their entire politics depends on concealing it.

Which is why people look for mates with a good sense of humor.

Feminists and communists were first:

Goodbye funny man

Boomers knew only improvement; Zoomers experience only decline. By John Carter.

Boomer’s experience [born 1946 – 1958, not 1964]:

I don’t want to minimize the hardships that boomers endured when they were young. Boomers worked hard, and they didn’t enjoy the same conveniences that we enjoy now. They fought in the Vietnam War (well, about 3% of them), they spent most of their lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, they suffered through the oil shock and stagflation in the 70s, they were punished by double-digit interest rates in the early 80s, and they spent their working lives trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the skyrocketing inflation that was unleashed when Bretton-Woods fell apart and the last vestigial support of the gold standard was kicked out from under the brrrring money printer.

But, despite all of that drama, the one thing boomers could generally rely upon was that — so long as thermonuclear annihilation was averted — things would generally get better.

• Technology would advance.
• Working conditions would get safer.
• The special effects in movies would become more convincing.
• Houses would get larger.
• Cars would get nicer.
• Air conditioning would get quieter.
• The environment would get cleaner.
• Society would become more just.
• The world would become freer and safer for democracy.
• And so on and so forth.

Baby boomers have enjoyed a charmed life such as no other generation has known: free of major wars, full of technical wonders, in which whatever difficulties you might endure now, you could generally count on the future being a better place. For the boomer, deferred gratification always had a payoff.

The Zoomer experience [born 1997 – 2012]:

For the zoomer — and the millennial [1965 – 1980], and generation X [1981 – 1996] — this has simply not been the case. After 9/11 a police state panopticon settled over society. The 2008 real estate crash pulled the rug out from under the millennials, after which real-estate got ZIRPed to the Moon. Mass immigration pumped real estate demand further, while undercutting wages and rendering public spaces steadily more alienating, unpleasant, and dangerous. Black Lives Matter immolated quaint notions of racial harmony. DEI threw young white men, their careers, their futures, and their unborn children to the wolves. COVID stole two years from young people’s lives so that old people could feel safe from the coof. Now, AI^2 (Artificial Intelligence + Actual Indians) means that the only thing the young expect in their future is gig work in the sex trade industry (until robots take that, too).

If you’re a young person, the only thing you’ve ever known is decline.

• You’ve seen society get digested by the attention economy, human interactions digitized into shares, views, and likes.
• You’ve seen the war of Discourse poison relations between the sexes to a degree never known before in history.
• You’ve seen dating apps replace romance with swipes and monogamy with Tindergamy.
• You’ve seen third spaces disappear.
• You’ve seen culture stagnate.
• You’ve seen music, movies, television shows, video games, and books be converted into hamfisted, poorly written, badly composed, terribly edited agitslop.
• You’ve seen the Internet get enshittified by adware, malware, spyware, engagement bait, and the subscription-model SaaS scam economy.
• You’ve seen food get more expensive, even as the quality of the ingredients declines, and the portion sizes decrease.
• You’ve seen a third of your income get stolen by inflation in a few year’s time.
• You’ve seen the basic elements of a human life – a house, a spouse, children – recede before you like a mirage in the desert.

I’d like to believe that this is all temporary, that things can be turned around, but if you tell me this hope is nothing more than cope it is very difficult for me to argue otherwise. Maybe things will finally improve and maybe they won’t; the point is that, for the young who have only ever known civilizational rot, it is entirely rational for them to lay down and let it rot.

Generation X and the millennials both tried to do everything right, according to what the boomers told them was the path forward: save money, study hard, get a ‘job’. At every stage we got rugpulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that.

Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen-X and the millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that.

That is why zoomers don’t care about ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ or ‘education’ or ‘savings’. They know there’s no such thing as institutional loyalty, that they’ll be cut loose the moment their job can be automated or outsourced to cheap Indian labour, and so why would they be loyal to their employers? Why would they do any more than the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting fired? Especially under the identitarian spoils system of DEI that makes a point of rewarding someone else for your hard work. …

This generational demoralization is a great tragedy. Zoomers have been spiritually sabotaged, and many of them will never recover. Once social trust is broken it is incredibly hard to rebuild.

The big picture — yes, the way money is manufactured corrupted it aall:

This is not entirely the boomers’ fault. They’ve been the primary beneficiaries of the vampire economy, and they are by far its strongest defenders, but they weren’t the ones who set the system up. That would be the ‘greatest generation’, who were the ones that built out the welfare state, passed the Civil Rights Act, dismantled long-standing protections against third-world immigration, and first started letting the money printer rip. Boomers have profited from a kind of generational Cantillon effect: they were born close to the time when inflation first began in earnest, meaning that the money they were lavished with would always be worth more than whatever spare change their children could scrape together. …

The only way to fix this is for things to start improving for young people again, and not in the sense of getting cheaper smartphones or whatever. We are talking about very basic, mammalian necessities: food, shelter, mating. …

Solution?

I don’t know how to solve this. Unless there’s a world-historical economic boom thanks to AI — which there’s no sign of yet, and furthermore it would need to be one whose benefits are not concentrated in the hands of a small number of oligarchs — there’s probably no way to solve it without pain. The only question is how that pain will be distributed. …

If we were sane we’d dismantle the social security system immediately, and start putting in place systems to transfer opportunity, wealth, and power to native-born child-bearing demographics immediately. This is improbable.

The most likely outcome is that, over the next decade or two, the boomers will spend down the last of the West’s national wealth on heroic end-of-life health care, and leave behind a broken mess of insolvency, shattered institutions, lost cultural knowledge, and tribal warfare. None of which will be a problem for the boomers. Après moi, le déluge.

It will be up to everyone else to piece together something resembling a functioning society amidst the ashes and ruins. By that point, millennials will be in their 50s and 60s; most of their lives will be behind them. Zoomers will be hitting middle age. Perhaps you can see why everyone under 50 is so dejected, and prefers treating themselves with the small pleasures they can still afford rather than dwelling upon the long decline that awaits?

Great. If the communists or Islamists don’t succeed in making all their serfs again.

Generation Jones, quietly in-between. By Supersonic Redhead.

 

There’s a generation a lot of people forget exists. We were born at the tail end of the Boomers, but we are not culturally the same as people born in the 40s and early 50s. We are Generation Jones [see Why People Born 1955–1964 Aren’t Baby Boomers, but Generation Jones].

And honestly, it explains a lot.

We grew up in a world that still felt fundamentally analog, but we were young enough to be dragged headfirst into the digital revolution. We are the bridge generation between rotary phones and smartphones, between slide rules and AI, between Walter Cronkite and algorithm driven media.

We remember when there were only a few television channels and the entire country watched the same thing at the same time. We also adapted to the internet, email, forums, social media, streaming and now artificial intelligence. We lived before and after the technological singularity hit everyday life.

That is not a small thing.

People born in the 40s came of age in a post World War II America that was still industrial, deeply hierarchical and institutionally stable. Their formative years were shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, the civil rights era and a society where information moved slowly.

Generation Jones came later. We inherited the aftermath of all of that.

We were the kids who watched Watergate destroy blind trust in government. We watched manufacturing begin to collapse. We saw divorce rates explode. We were the first truly latchkey generation in massive numbers. We learned independence early because many of us had to.

We grew up with one foot in old America and one foot in whatever this new thing was becoming.

 

 

We played outside until the streetlights came on but we also learned DOS commands. We learned cursive and keyboarding. We had card catalogs and Google searches. We went from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming in one lifetime.

We remember maps. We remember memorizing phone numbers. We remember life before GPS and before every human interaction became filtered through a screen.

And because of that, I think Generation Jones developed a very unique perspective. We are adaptable because we had no choice but to adapt. We learned technology as adults instead of being born into it. We remember a slower world but were forced to survive in a rapidly accelerating one.

That creates a very different mindset than either older Boomers or younger Gen X and Millennials.

A lot of us also reject the caricature people now associate with “Boomers.” We were not buying houses for the cost of a sandwich in 1965. The interest rate on my first house was over 14% and that was after buying down a point. Many of us got hit by recessions, outsourcing, pension collapses and economic instability just like younger generations did. We watched promises evaporate in real time.

We understand older generations because we were raised by them. We understand younger generations because we had to evolve alongside them.

That’s why the Jones generation often feels culturally homeless. We are rarely discussed, rarely defined and usually lumped into categories that don’t actually fit us.

But we exist.

We are the human transition point between the industrial age and the digital age.

And frankly, there will probably never be another generation quite like us again.

 

 

The Future of Political Advertising. By Matthew Hennessy atWSJ Free Expression.

In Los Angeles, an innovative form of political advertising is getting a real-world test. Spencer Pratt’s upstart campaign for mayor is surging, in part, because of the viral lift he’s gotten from a series of short videos…

The videos are effective because they ignore most of the rules of traditional political advertising. They aren’t trying to make Mr. Pratt, a political novice, seem serious and experienced. They aren’t trying to fill in gaps in his biography. Rather they are aiming to raise the stakes in an election that would typically be a cakewalk for the incumbent. They speak with an original narrative vocabulary. They do things nobody thought you were allowed to do.

Ms. Bass has complained that the videos are “150% fiction,” but it isn’t illegal or unheard of to stretch the truth in a political ad. The real fiction may be the idea that these are political ads at all.

If you notice, the clips don’t come with the usual disclaimer at the end: “I’m Spencer Pratt, and I approve this message.” That’s because his campaign isn’t producing them. These are “fan” videos, made by filmmaker Charlie Curran.

This is something new — videos that look like and do the work of political advertising but that aren’t paid for by a campaign or political action committee and don’t feature any footage or audio from the candidate himself.

The Federal Election Commission regulates political advertising, largely by requiring disclosures and enforcing funding limits and coordination rules. Does any of that apply here? Hard to tell. Mr. Curran has free speech, after all….

Nobody can say for sure how much a 60-second AI-generated spot costs to make. But it’s radically less expensive than hiring a film crew to produce cinematic ads like Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” or Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy.”

Some examples:

These Spencer Pratt videos keep getting better and better pic.twitter.com/21h3As31mh

— kevin smith (@kevin_smith45) May 20, 2026

 

 

Taiwan and Japan, the Big Betrayal Underway. By David Archibald.

An interesting speculation:

This is what may be going on in Trump’s brain. He wants Greenland. He thinks that big countries should have the right to swallow small countries near them. Thus he approves of Russia invading Ukraine and has been helping Russia as much as possible. And China invading Taiwan. Those invasions make seizing Greenland seem like the natural course of things.

There was the problem that a great chunk of the world’s high end semiconductor production came from Taiwan. But that has been mitigated by the new fabrication plants being built in the US. When Taiwan’s facilities are destroyed in the Chinese invasion, that will make the US plants more valuable. …

It may be that Trump is getting over his skis, which could yet save Greenland. After the success of Venezuela, he went for another aerial attack on Iran, which has proved intractable. For Trump to win against Iran, there has to be regime change from the current theocracy. The theocracy is looking forward to the battle. It is their life’s work. The 40,000 Iranians killed by the regime in January were just a warmup. So far Trump has desisted from making the lives of ordinary Iranians more miserable by bombing the Iranian power stations and desalination plants. The problem is that it will be hard to win in Iran without boots on the ground, and the US Army isn’t prepared to handle drones yet. They will get chewed up.

See it all.