The Roman Empire was brought down by entitlement spending. By Wall Street Apes.

Historian Johan Norberg explains that one of the major factors in taking down the Roman Empire that’s rarely discussed, is the rise in entitlement spending

So many people started receiving welfare and it kept getting expanded, it quickly skyrocket inflation and destroyed their currency. …

“The emperors wanted to become popular by handing out free stuff to people. Originally, this started small. You just handed the very poor means of subsistence, make sure that they would but that group was enlarged because it was popular. So the group that lived on the public’s expense grew larger all the time

And emperors complained about this constantly while they were expanding it.

Everyone from Caesar and onwards said, “Oh, we’ve gotta reform this system because it means that we have fewer people working and more people consuming.” But no one succeeded. Instead, it was expanded all the time became more and more costly. …

“It’s a very worrying sign in each of these civilizations. Once you have an ever-expanding system of entitlements that you can’t afford, then you have to deal with it in different ways. Well, some of them just try to conquer other people’s and take their stuff. But once you run out of that, you have to resort to inflation. Rome started to debase the currency. …

Roughly 20% of the entire population ended up on welfare, it got so out of control they devalued their currency by 98%.

Unstoppable and ever-increasing entitlement spending inevitably leads to required currency debasement, and attracts parasitic immigrants. The parallels with the modern West are obvious.

By the way, the original Roman and Ancient Greeks were Germanic tribe who moved south. Many of them — e.g. Alexander the Great — were blonde, and tribal virtue and was high. Over time, migration to the economic powerhouse that was Rome changed the population, until blondness or virtue became rare. Maybe the welfare attracted less able people. In any case, the Roman population of 400 AD was very different from the Roman population of 200 BC.

 

Auslinks

Playing shag, marry, kill is not sexist, it’s about sex.

Albo committed a political crime, not a feminist one.

The yuck factor is learning far too much about his political brain. Here he was calculating that if he played sex word games with a female podcaster, he might be seen to be cool by young female voters who he reckons might play the same game. If I am right about that, we can surely settle on this: Anthony Albanese is a moron. He has exposed himself as a desperate, conniving fool. …

[Feminists?] Faux outrage went viral. … Shag, marry, kill, is a girls’ game. It’s been played by women and girls for as long as I’ve known. If boys played it, they wouldn’t bother with marry or kill. It would be: who’d ya shag?

Australia’s ruling class have put on a world-class display of antisemitism :

Throughout my 26-year career as an Israeli diplomat I have never seen such levels of hatred of Israel, and of Jews, as I experience and witness here in Australia.

I served as ambassador in two Muslim countries. Yet I did not see these levels of hatred. The non-radicalised and unpoliticised Muslims understood the issues and showed more understanding than the obsessive herds on the streets of Australia calling for Israel’s annihilation and protesting against Israel’s existence.

Albo and Kylie Minogue??

The real problem was that he was sitting on a couch at The Lodge, sipping whisky with a comic alter ego, waiting to be asked inappropriate questions. PMs don’t accidentally wander into these formats.

What was the Prime Minister thinking? Judgement awry:

Unfortunately, for the PM, it didn’t go as planned. His smutty banter turned TikToxic once it was transcribed. Nobody wants to read that the PM schedules sex after the footy because a win for the Rabbitohs, is ‘a good aphrodisiac’, or that if his recent marriage to Jodie Haydon goes ‘tits up’, he’d ‘shag, marry or date’ Kylie Minogue. There were jokes about Aboriginal Australians populating the country in a place called HumpyBong, and whether Jodie talked about Iron Knob. The nadir was Albanese recounting how the Japanese Prime Minister gave him ‘a couple of melons’, using hand gestures to turn the diplomatic gift into a sleazy double entendre.

Training the next generation:

A new era of teaching in Australian schools launched last month. Through lesson-provider Cool.org, teachers can now create their own tailored lessons via artificial intelligence engines. This input will produce in ten seconds a teacher’s 4500-word plan of scripts, notes and kids’ worksheets, all neatly keyed to state or federal curricula.

The bad news is that the AI slop arrives steeped in green-left influence aimed at turning kids into know-all activists and campaigners for Aboriginal treaties and wind turbines. …

Since Cool was started by the multi-millionaire Just Jeans’ Kimberley clan in 2008, around 200,000 teachers have done close to 20 million lesson downloads. Currently these scripts reach 2.5 million kids per year. Close to 95% of all schools have at least one teacher downloading Cool material. Most of it is harmless, even beneficial, but anything faintly political gets the green-left makeover.

The left, messed up themselves and driven by envy, prefer everything to be messed up. By Devon Eriksen.

Why is it when they portray a super racist and fascist society it’s always beautifully clean, tidy, quiet and peaceful?

Why is it when they portray a super racist and fascist society it’s always beautifully clean, tidy, quiet and peaceful? pic.twitter.com/GAzsm5Ha96

— Klara (@klara_sjo) July 7, 2026

Fascism is a disgust spiral, whose basic commandment is “thou shalt not be worse than me.” It starts out with anti-smoking campaigns and burning child pornography, and ends up disappearing anyone who doesn’t mow his lawn.

Communism is an envy spiral, whose basic commandment is “thou shalt not be better than me.” It starts out targeting captains of industry and genius intellectuals, and ends up disappearing anyone who wears glasses, which create the suspicion that he might have read a book once.

This is why people with communist psychology (the left) equate clean streets with fascism.

Leftists can’t keep their streets clean and their lawns mowed, but instead of the psychologically healthy response of being slightly embarrassed and resolving to do better, they decide that anyone in a nice neighborhood is a fascist who needs to be exposed and purged.

You, oh right-wing conservative, watching this video clip, think that leftists are accidentally pointing out the benefits of fascism…. i.e. that people can have nice things.

But if you understood communist psychology, really understood it, you would realize that the mowed lawns, clean streets, and neatly-groomed people are actually another accusation.

Not only are they racists, complains the narrative, they have nicer houses and neighborhoods than you. How dare they?How dare they not be surrounded by trash and graffiti? How dare they not be awoken at 3 AM by their drunk neighbors blasting loud music? Who do they think they are, some sort of superior race?

You don’t notice that accusation because you are not the target audience. The target audience is people prone to destructive envy, and the goal is to recruit them to communism.

They don’t care if you think this points out the benefits of fascism, or even just the benefits of racism. Because you are not prone to destructive envy, so they can never recruit you anyway.

And it makes no difference if you point out that the end result of this is that every neighborhood is covered in trash and graffiti.

That’s what commies want.

Why? Because their neighborhoods are always going to be messed up no matter what ideology is in control. Fascism, communism, liberalism, objectivism, doesn’t matter. They are not disciplined enough to do battle with entropy through sustained effort, and not creative or intelligent enough to do battle with entropy through innovation.

But if their house is inevitably going to be surrounded by mountains of trash, just because of who they are, then the greatest comfort they can aspire to is a world where your house is surrounded by trash, too.

This is why communism ruins everything, and why communists cannot be dissuaded when you point this out. Ruining everything for anyone who’s better off is what they want.

The trick is to get them to realize that communism allows anyone who is even worse off than they to ruin whatever they still have. Which isn’t easy, because if they were smart enough to easily understand this, they wouldn’t be surrounded by trash in the first place.

A great insight. Analysis: true.

Nigel Farage lays down the gauntlet. By Brendan O’Neill at spiked.

With righteous indignation, Nigel Farage has resigned today as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election that he intends to fight. He’s giving up his seat in the hope he’ll win it back. Why? Because he believes it should be ordinary people, not the turbo-smug media classes, who determine his destiny. ‘Why should they be the people that decide my fate?’, he asked, spitting out the word ‘they’ with highly warranted contempt. Only ‘the people of Clacton’ should be ‘the judges of my actions’, he said.

It’s a bold move. For it wrestles Farage’s fate — and the future of populism itself — from the whining and mudslinging of the cloistered media classes and returns it to the cool deliberation of the people. It was in a televised press conference that he made his announcement. His voice quivering with rage, he slammed the media for obsessing over allegedly dodgy donations he received from rich pals. He’d been subjected to ‘constant demonisation by the press’, he said, with the aim of hounding him from public life simply because he gives voice to ‘the consensual view on many issues’. He then disarmed the knife-wielding media plotters, robbing them of their power by inviting the people of Clacton to pass judgement on him instead. It’s clever. And it’s risky.

The media have been sniffing for scandal around Farage for weeks now (well, years). The latest storm involves a £5million donation he received from a cryptocurrency investor in April 2024, before he became an MP, and some financial assistance he received from his longstanding ally, George Cottrell, who once did jailtime in the US for wire fraud. The parliamentary commissioner for standards is investigating the five million quid, which Farage did not declare. The media elites are salivating. Every earthly issue must now play second fiddle to their onanistic obsession with Farage’s ‘sleazy’ antics.

Two things can be true at once. One, Farage may not have followed all the rules on these donations (let’s see). And two, the media fever over the donations is a brazen political crusade motivated less by a love for probity in public life than by an ugly, burning urge to rid British politics of its best-known populist….

‘I am the most physically and verbally attacked public figure… of modern times’, he said. He reminded us that he’s had milkshakes thrown in his face, placards bashed over his head, death threats. The breaking point, he said, was The Sunday Times allegedly publishing a photo of the house where his daughter lives. He said he’s ‘never been angrier’.

Rather than risk defeat in a populist versus establishment contest, the main parties are refusing to run candidates. The only other candidate in the by-election is Count Binface:

Who? Count Binface, “Who dares, bins.”

The major parties are hoping for a second by-election, triggered by an adverse probity finding against Mr Farage, in a coupe of months time. They are banking on voter fatigue and an adverse finding to defeat Mr Popularity.

Our public service is too big and unproductive. By Henry Innis in The Spectator.

The government has been delivering less outcomes per capita for more money per capita, and the only response to the Australian taxpayer is ‘spend more money’. That’s what the CGT debate should be really about.

We are getting less bang for our buck. Across almost every service that actually matters — schools, hospitals, prisons, the roads and rail we are endlessly promised — we are paying more per unit and getting worse outcomes. That is the textbook example of a government failing in management, failing to manage the public service and failing to deliver value for money. …

I notice this because I run a company. Founders live and die essentially on a single number: output per dollar. Every hire, every tool, every dollar of spend has to earn its place, because if it doesn’t the business dies. There is no bailout (other than dilutive VC funding or debt), no supplementary appropriation, no press release that fixes broken unit economics. That discipline is not fun, both internally and in the market, but it is the thing that makes the private sector work.

So when I look at government, I’m not being ideological. I’m behaving as a taxpayer should. I want value for money. I want to ask the obvious question: What did we get for that? Increasingly, the honest answer is ‘less than last year’. When you spend your life obsessing over unit economics and then watch the largest enterprise in the country (our government) do the exact opposite with your money, frustration is the rational response. …

The numbers tell a sad story:

The Productivity Commission finds that the non-market sector … has been going backwards on labour productivity since 2014, with the decline steepening after 2022 … Since 2021, employment in those sectors has surged about 24 per cent, more than double the 9.6 per cent in the market economy — more people, more money, flat-to-negative output.

The input side confirms it. Public sector headcount grew 3.3 per cent in 2024-25, roughly double population growth, with Commonwealth jobs up 5.6 per cent (ABS). Government spending now sits near 26.9 per cent of GDP (Trading Economics). The costs are staggeringly high.

Government spending as percentage of GDP, to 2024. Spot the Whitlam Government. Australia is now at 26.9%. It will be easy to spot the Albanese Government when the graph goes for a few more years.

Failing everywhere:

Schools. Real spending per student rose about 14 per cent over the past decade. Over the same period, Australian PISA maths results fell …the equivalent of students being more than a year behind where they were in 2000.

Prisons. … More than half of people who leave prison are back within two years, a national recidivism rate of about 52.5 per cent and rising …

Infrastructure. … Major projects run a mean cost overrun of 23 per cent. We are paying dramatically more for each kilometre we manage to actually deliver.

Hospitals. Public hospitals are the fastest-growing line in government health spending, north of $80 billion a year, yet Australians now wait nearly twice as long for planned surgery as they did two decades ago …

Cause — no accountability:

Layer on the absence of any competitive pressure, a culture that treats headcount as a proxy for seriousness and refuses to sack people, and a political system that rewards announcements over delivery, and you get exactly what we have: an enterprise with no incentive to deliver better outcomes. …

The private sector has had enough:

Imagine running a business [like the NDIS]. A product line’s output per dollar falls three years running, and your response is to triple its budget without changing a thing about how it operates. You would be laughed out of your own boardroom. In government, it’s called reform.

This is mismanagement at its most expensive — and it is precisely why the private sector is now in open revolt. Business is turning up to the government’s own productivity roundtables with the same message, because it is our productivity, our capital and our tax base being quietly eroded (Treasury). We’re all screaming about CGT not just because it impacts us. It’s because we are being asked to fund a completely out of control government. …

The private sector has spent a decade being told to do more with less. It is well past time we asked the public service to do the same. It’s time we end the era of unproductive government.

But the right people are getting the taxpayer money — that’s what politics is all about now! Get with it. SightBringer on the similar phenomenon in US cities:

The left-populist promise is that government will discipline capital and protect ordinary people.

The hidden fragility is that city government itself is staffed and run by a professional class with its own compensation demands, institutional incentives, and status expectations.

Once that class starts extracting while preaching affordability, the coalition begins to rot from inside.

Team Big Government is getting ever bigger and pricier, and the rest of us can no longer afford it.

Albanese government accused of fuelling organised crime and corruption nationwide. By Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian.

ALP strategists in Canberra who advocate an early election next year are now waking up to the likelihood of a severe economic downturn following the wealth reduction measures in the federal budget.

But by 2027 another danger is likely to emerge. The Albanese government’s mistakes are directly contributing to the crime and corruption affecting the building and retail sectors, not just in Victoria but around the nation. It will become a national political issue by 2027.

The Commonwealth government (under both parties) has fostered organised crime around the country via its ridiculous tobacco excise rates. …

Now organised criminals are demanding that conventional retailers who do not sell illegal cigarettes pay protection money or risk having their premises burnt down. The criminal’s next step will be to attack all retailers.

This is Mafia-style criminality that we have never before seen in Australia and, given that it was triggered by the Commonwealth government’s foolish actions, it must take responsibility. …

On the building side, the Victorian government’s fostering of organised crime through its close links with the CFMEU and building unions is no secret. For the nation, the Victorian disease must be contained. It has already infected Snowy 2.0. …

It’s in Victoria, but all Australians pay for it:

We are discovering that the [Victorian] government knew there had been a 30 per cent increase in building costs across most major infrastructure projects as a result of criminal activity and restrictive work practices. The amount of cash that flowed to organised crime is reported to be about $15bn. A Royal Commission is desperately needed.

Anthony Albanese contributed to that exodus of money when he abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission. The commission might not have stopped the money drain, but it would have curtailed it and exposed it.

Meanwhile, in Victoria, the organised crime operators who have plagued major building projects are discovering that their existing honey pots are reaching completion. They need a new project to continue extracting taxpayers’ money. And guess what? A potential honey pot of enormous proportions has been devised — the so-called Suburban Rail Loop. …

The project made no economic sense and was, at least initially, ridiculed by Infrastructure Australia. But the Prime Minister and the Treasurer pulled strings and allocated $6 billion to the project. If there is a change of government in Victoria in November, the incoming administration will naturally want to alter the project, but that will not be easy given the long term contracts that have been signed and their enormous break clauses.

Much more deserving infrastructure projects in other states missed out because the Commonwealth chose to put its money on the CFMEU racket trail. That will become an issue at the next federal election.

The Labor Party was established as the voice of the unions, and the unions are the main source of funds for the ALP and have 50% of the votes in every ALP preselection. The ALP is always going to be prone to corruption that is led by unions.

Norway’s soccer team– the Viking way!

The Viking row, as performed after putting Brazil out of the World Cup — spectacular:

If you don’t celebrate your own traditions, then you will have to celebrate someone else’s traditions.

The Norwegian team celebrates the right way and we all love it.

The Viking way. But also wearing the Cross of Christ with pride. pic.twitter.com/8wHJG1GXhd

— Seth (@seth_fin) July 6, 2026

Seth:

If you don’t celebrate your own traditions, then you will have to celebrate someone else’s traditions.

The Norwegian team celebrates the right way and we all love it.

The Viking way. But also wearing the Cross of Christ with pride.

Restore Australia:

The obsession around Norway at this world cup shows that people admire largely homogeneous cultures who show solidarity, pride and respect for their past traditions and ancestors. The Norwegians aren’t apologetic for their Viking past, they embrace it.

We must do the same. Our Anglo Saxon, Celtic and Brythonic ancestors created one of the greatest cultures on the British isles, and civilised the entire world through the Agricultural & Industrial revolutions and the British empire. Australia exceptionalism through both world wars, in global sporting prowess and in creating the greatest nation on earth from scratch, was the cherry on top of an already great heritage.

Craig Kelly:

Norway has firmly rejected mass migration and proudly celebrates its traditions and heritage — including its Viking past.

Now imagine if the same leftists and cultural Marxists who’ve infested Australia had managed to infiltrate Norway instead.

They’d immediately demand the Christian cross be stripped from the national team’s shirt and the national flag to reflected the “new diversity”.

The celebrated ‘Viking Row’ would be labelled “toxic masculinity,” and anyone participating would be shamed for displaying “cultural insensitivity.”

So instead of Norwegians roaring with pride during their Viking Row, they’d be forced to grovel through some pathetic sorry apology statement — condemning their ancestors for “terrorising and plundering European towns, stealing valuables, and capturing slaves” — while wallowing in manufactured guilt.

All designed to ensure young Norwegians are taught to despise their nation’s history.

So yes, let’s learn from Norway and celebrate with pride Australia’s history, culture and traditions.

Meet Norway’s Erling Haaland, the strapping lad who bangs the drum above and scores most of Norway’s goals (Sama Hoole):

Erling Haaland put Brazil out of a World Cup on Sunday night.

Here is everything that went into the body that did it …

The papers love the 6,000-calorie figure. He waves it off and says he doesn’t count. He just eats real food until he’s done and goes and scores.

What’s on the plate:

– Beef heart and beef liver, by choice, from the butcher
– Tomahawk, ribeye, short ribs, the fattier the better
– Eggs, most mornings, on sourdough
– Salmon, mackerel, sea bass
– Raw milk, by the glass, in the coffee, blended with greens
– Raw honey
– Butter, rice, sourdough
– His dad’s lasagne before every home game. A kebab pizza once a year, if he’s lucky

What never touches it:

– Seed oils
– Fizzy drinks
– Alcohol, near enough none
– Protein powders and processed supplements. Not one.
– Ultra-processed anything
– Tap water. He filters it

The official guidance spent fifty years telling you to fear that plate. The best striker alive built it on purpose and is knocking the five-time champions out of a World Cup with it.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Debanking is alive and well in Australia. By Phil C..

Debanking is alive and well in Australia, we just don’t hear about it. It’s a frightening attack on our liberties against which we have little recourse. The banks are not required to advise reasons to those who they debank, and indeed the bank may be forbidden to do so, principally because so doing might alert some that they are on a watch list or are under investigation.

Consider the effect this outrage has on a citizen. He or she is essentially unable to function in the economy and will have to depend on cash savings and the good graces of family and friends. Those affected become a non-person, totally helpless. How can they afford a lawyer?

Is this a violation a sort of “Bill of Attainder”?

A Bill of Attainder is an act of a legislature that declares a specific person or group guilty of a crime and punishes them without the benefit of a judicial trial. This practice circumvents standard due process, effectively bypassing the courts and the separation of powers.”

Australia’s Constitution does not explicitly ban bills of attainder, but the High Court of Australia has ruled them unconstitutional.

Many Australian citizens, businesses, and organisations have been “debanked” — having their accounts suddenly closed or restricted by financial institutions. In some cases, the bank also debanked associates or family members. See here.

Targeted groups include:

• Sex Workers and Adult Industry: Many sex workers and brothel owners have had their personal and business accounts terminated by major banks due to prejudice or perceived anti-money laundering risks.
• “Extremist” Groups: Leading members of Australian neo-Nazi networks (such as the National Socialist Network) have had multiple bank accounts shut down and frozen by private sector banks.[Lesson: Populism not tolerated!]
• Fintechs and Crypto: Over 100 Australian fintech and cryptocurrency businesses have been cut off from banking services due to banks strictly enforcing risk-management and anti-money laundering policies. [Lesson: Don’t compete with the banks!]
• Individuals: High-profile figures, including media commentators and escort/business owners, have reported having their banking services abruptly cut with little to no explanation.

The legal framework governing debanking in Australia relies heavily on a bank’s freedom of contract and their risk-management duties under Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing (AML/CTF) legislation.

Debanking is a nightmare back door to tyranny. Individuals have nowhere to turn. There is no appeal through the courts. Just another power governments have to control us.

See also this post on Zerohedge, “The UK’s Latest “Debanking” Scandal Should Give Everyone Pause.”

UK censorship grab: Government to take control of the Youtube algorithm. By Basil the Great.

Keir Starmer’s/Andy Burnham’s Government is set to control the YouTube algorithm by LAW stipulating that they must push “APPROVED CONTENT” to UK Citizens

And independent voices who criticise the government will be pushed to the back of the queue making it harder for people to find

YouTube has acknowledged this is happening

 

 

Mike Benz:

YouTube can’t stop this. They need the US State Dept & White House to step in and counter with threats to British interests in the US. Threaten you will hit Shell/BP in energy, AstraZeneca/GSK in pharma, BAE in defense, & HSBC/Barclays in finance the second the Brits hit YouTube.

Chaser:

British Police arrest a man for describing Muhammed and Islam accurately.

Blasphemy laws in the UK are real.

British Police arrest a man for describing Muhammed and Islam accurately

Blasphemy laws in the UK are realpic.twitter.com/KBjwusT7TR

— Basil the Great (@BasilTheGreat) July 4, 2026

 

Commenters:

They’ll arrest a real Briton for telling the truth and protect the Muslim rape gangs. Wake up and take your country back!!! …

Isn’t the truth a legitimate defense? UK is lost. …

Since when is ‘evil ideologists’ an arrestable offence? The police wonder why they’re losing whatever support they once had. …

I have never once seen an on-camera arrest for a Muslim spewing hate and vitriol about the West. If one exists I’d love to see it, but I’ve never seen it. …

One day there will be a guy crazy enough to pull out the Quran and Hadiths and start reading from them publically. Including the part where their prophet married a 6 year old and consumated her at 9. How they consider their prophet “the greatest and most perfect man to ever live, the ultimate moral role model and the final messenger of God” How women has less rights then men in every way possible. Teach the public about how evil Muhammad was. …

Question is, who wants this? If you went up to 100 Brits on the street and said “Do you want medieval blasphemy laws?” probably 100 out of 100 would say no. …

‘We’ve had freedom of speech for a very long time’ – Keir Starmer

hat-tip Phil

What China’s real estate bust means for you. By Sightbringer.

This chart is the largest destruction of household wealth in recorded history, executed deliberately by the state that owned it. …

 

China’s real estate market has erased all gains from the last 20 years

 

Ghost cities of investment vehicles

 

Twenty years of real gains gone means the primary savings vehicle of 1.4 billion people, sixty to seventy percent of Chinese household wealth, round-tripped to 2006. Nothing in the American 2008 experience approaches this scale.

Investment options within China are severely limited: basically real estate, gold, and a controlled stock market. The Government used to direct people to invest in real estate, but a few years ago switched to encouraging investments in gold instead.

The Chinese Government has hoarded at least 20,000 tonnes of gold, but probably nearer 80,000 tonnes, vastly more than the US Government (which supposedly has 8,000 tonnes, but much of it appears to be lent out, not in its vaults). There are persistent rumors that China will soon challenge the US for monetary supremacy with a gold-backed currency, in which case the price of gold will soar and the people of China will become gloriously wealthy.

The transmission runs from real estate to gold, the Chinese piggy bank. That connects this chart directly to the nineteen-month PBoC accumulation streak and the retail gold frenzy running through Shanghai and Shenzhen. The domestic store of value died, the capital account is closed, and the surviving vessels inside the wall are gold, deposits yielding nothing, and quietly, Hong Kong crypto rails.

The sovereign gold bid and the household gold bid are the same event: capital fleeing a dead asset class with nowhere else to go. …

The deliberateness is the part Western commentary refuses to metabolize. Xi drew the three red lines in August 2020, and the chart peaks within months. “Houses are for living, not for speculation” was a demolition order, executed to redirect national capital from land finance into manufacturing and strategic technology.

The demolition succeeded and then kept falling past the point of control, which is the signature failure mode of command economies: they can start avalanches and cannot stop them. The state chose this trade, prosperity of the household balance sheet exchanged for industrial supremacy, and the chart is the receipt.

What it does to the world: a China that cannot sell its citizens apartments sells the world overcapacity instead. The property bust is the engine of the export deflation machine, EVs, solar, chemicals, chips at the mature nodes, flooding out at prices that reflect a state subsidizing employment rather than seeking margin.

The darkest layer sits in legitimacy mechanics. The Party’s compact was prosperity for obedience, and the prosperity was denominated in apartments. A regime that can no longer deliver the wealth escalator has two remaining legitimacy channels: nationalism and security. Every percentage point this index falls raises the marginal value of the Taiwan card, the anti-American frame, the external enemy. The chart does not predict war. It repriced the incentive structure that decides one, and the direction of the repricing is unambiguous.  …

News you can use:

The gold thesis strengthens at its root, because the largest population on earth just lost its default asset and the replacement flow has years to run [up in price]. The US disinflation-in-goods leg has a structural sponsor.

David Archibald:

The Chicoms scrimped and saved for the last 20 years to buy newly built apartments as a store of wealth. There are 65 million unoccupied apartments in China.

All that has been wiped out in the last five years. The wealth evaporation from this asset class is some US$20 trillion, which is the current annual GDP of the Chicom economy.

For the 300 million in the six coastal provinces that produce things, the per capita decrease has been US$67,000. That is US$200,000 for a family of three.

Therefore a great chunk of China’s population is demoralised.

Chinese domestic spending will be down a load and their GDP will shrink.

And it is impacting on their military. Chicom incursions around Taiwan in June this year were 60% down compared to last June:

Knife-wielding African teen in country Victoria. By The Noticer.

An African teenager has been photographed holding a long knife while walking through a town in regional Victoria in broad daylight …

The image shows the male, who appears to be in his teens, holding the blade behind his back on St Georges Road in Shepparton on Friday afternoon.

He was accompanied by two other black-clad youths, one wearing a black balaclava and the other with long hair in a ponytail.

Local residents said the group were later spoken to by police at the nearby train station and let go after the knife was confiscated, but Victoria Police has refused to comment on the incident.

The photo sparked outrage in the surrounding area and Australia-wide after being shared on social media, with many saying such scenes were unimaginable not too long ago.

“Oh God they’re all the way out in Shepparton too now? Man we can’t get Pauline in fast enough,” wrote one Aussie.

“I have never seen this behaviour anywhere in Australia, let alone in a country area,” said another.

“Remember when we were called racists for saying we had an African gang problem,” a third commented.

But others said that Shepparton, which was 69.9% Australian-born at the time of the 2021 Census, was home to a growing number of people from third world countries.

“Shepparton has been flooded with immigrants, almost all of our beautiful orchards have been uprooted to make room for new land to house all these newcomers. Our ‘super’ school is a haven for gangs. Not the place to be,” one local said. …

The disturbing scenes come days after a Somalian teenager was allegedly stabbed to death in Melbourne’s north amid the city’s ongoing African gang crisis.

Young people of African background make up 50% of those in youth detention in Victoria, despite being less than one percent of the population.

Nothing to see here, says our globalist ruling class.

Who voted for people like this in our neighborhoods? Does democracy still mean anything?

We could have been a contender. By Alexandra Marshall.

If we hadn’t spent a single cent on Net Zero.

And hadn’t pursued mass migration from the third world.

Just those two things.

We’d be one of the richest nations, per capita, in the world. One of the safest nations. One of the most energy-rich nations. A nation where our own kids are first in every queue – housing, education, employment…

Two mistakes from politicians cost us EVERYTHING.

Is universal suffrage really such a god idea? By Devon Eriksen.

The United States electoral map if only White males were able to vote.

 

If only White males were allowed to vote, as the founders intended, or if there were any other remotely sane filter on the disaster that is universal suffrage, such as:

– Must have a certain net worth to vote.
– Must be a net taxpayer to vote.
– Must have an IQ > 104.9 to vote.
– Must pass a basic algebra test to vote.
– Must be a military vet to vote.
– Must pass a test of hypothetical reasoning to vote.
– Must pay a significant amount of money to vote.

… then this map would not be what it is.

There would be no democrats or republicans. The parties and candidates would be entirely different.

If we were to treat the vote as an office, rather than a right, just as the ancient Greeks did, then not only would we make different choices, we would have different options.

Right now, the majority of voters are retards, either actually because they are stupid, or functionally because they are so misinformed they might as well be stupid.

You don’t give a retard a choice between a game of chess, Beethoven’s fifth symphony, or an Alastair Reynolds novel. You give a retard a choice between a juice box, a cookie, and an episode of Rick and Morty.

So when you have stupid voters, even the minority of smart voters are constrained to choose between the options that dummies will accept.

This shapes the whole political landscape far more profoundly than the mere results of the latest election.

If there were some sort of competence filter on the vote — and almost any competence filter would do — then we would be an entirely different country, a better country, a country with problems like “how do we maximize our technological advancement?”, rather than “how do we keep retarded boomers from flooding our country with barbarians?”.

Universal suffrage was a huge mistake, a mistake based on the stupid idea that voting is a right. It is not.

To vote is to influence and dictate policies that control the actions of others, policies that are ultimately enforced with state violence.

There is no right to govern others with violence.

Indeed, the very idea would be unacceptable, save for the unavoidable fact that there are many people who must be governed with violence, because they will not voluntarily govern themselves.

So we have to do it somehow.

Voting, and thereby governing others with violence, is a privilege, not a right.

And the only people truly qualified for that privilege are those who don’t need to be governed at all — those who could peacefully, fairly, and fruitfully coexist with each other under conditions of perfect anarchy.

But, even if we lack the magical ability to detect such people, every democracy can always be improved by better filtering the voting privilege. …

The quality of a democracy is the quality of its voters.

Imagine requiring voters to pass a trigonometry test, instead, if you will.

I don’t know how such a change would be politically achievable, even though nothing in the constitution forbids it. How does one persuade, force, or trick the marching morons into allowing their own disenfranchisement?

But steps in this direction will eventually be necessary. Because no universal democracy can survive in the long term.

Commenters:

A very minor quibble — it isn’t competence per se that we are lacking. It’s ‘skin in the game’ — voters should only be voting on issues where they have something to lose.

Our Republic was designed so that the only issues under Federal jurisdiction were broadly based. But now that you can vote yourself largesse to be paid for by others even as a non-net-taxpayer, the system has broken down. …

I still think Robert Heinlein had it right: service grants citizenship, whether military or of another kind. …

I dunno, bro. The notion of ‘democracy’ managed by the ‘expert’ class is the whole reason the Boomers are retarded, and the more affluent and educated are the most retarded. The manipulation is the management. …

There needs to be a different qualifier other than general intelligence, especially in the upper end. Very smart people are so smart that they become retarded again. They can’t imagine a dumb person, just like a dumb person can’t imagine a hypothetical. …

How about voting disqualifies you from public assistance for the year? …

Welfare state retrenchment..  becomes impossible once low fertility rates invert the age pyramid, since aging makes people more dependent on others. Revolutions can only be carried out by young men. …

The way things are going now, the only ones to limit the franchise and pick up the pieces will be the Muslims. The retards will happily accept that juice box and march into the next dark ages praising Allah.

The Ancient Greeks had centuries of experience with democracies in their city states. They found that democracies lasted until the voters learned to vote themselves the contents of the Treasury. Government then became chaotic and ineffectual, a bunfight for resources. A strong man then took over, to restore order. The ruling class demanded he share his power, so a democracy with limited suffrage emerged after a while. Under pressure for fairness and equity, the suffrage was extended and extended. And the cycle repeated.

AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced. By Jemma Green in Forbes.

The present moment looks like this: companies cutting human labour to fund artificial intelligence that currently costs more than the labour it replaces, in pursuit of productivity gains that most studies cannot yet verify, at a pace that is exhausting annual budgets in weeks. …

The technology that was supposed to make human labour obsolete is, at this moment, more expensive than the humans it was meant to replace. Companies are laying off workers to fund the very AI tools that cost more than the workers they just let go. …

Uber’s CTO, recently disclosed that the company burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. By March, 84 percent of Uber’s engineers had adopted Claude Code, and roughly 70 percent of committed code now originates with AI. The usage was enormous. The corresponding value was murkier. Uber’s COO and President, Andrew Macdonald, conceded publicly that token usage didn’t seem to correlate directly with useful features shipped to users. …

When a resource becomes cheap enough to waste, people waste it without a second thought. When it becomes expensive enough to matter, they develop a sudden, fervent interest in efficiency. Artificial intelligence appears to be hurtling toward that same reckoning — except the waste is measured in billions, and it arrives on a heavy monthly invoice. …

For a long time, the working assumption was that costs were falling. Per-token prices have indeed dropped, and Gartner forecasts that running the largest models could be nearly ninety per cent cheaper by 2030. The catch is that consumption has scaled faster than prices have fallen. A study by Faros AI found that “code churn,” lines of code deleted versus lines added, increased by more than 800% under high AI adoption. More tokens in, more work thrown away.

AI is still subsidized, not profitable:

The prices companies are paying for AI usage now are not real prices. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta are all pricing inference below the cost of serving it, burning venture capital to buy market share. OpenAI spends nearly two dollars for every dollar it earns on inference. Sam Altman admitted publicly that the company loses money on its $200 per month subscriptions. The subsidy model started unwinding this year. …

In April 2026, Anthropic moved enterprise customers from flat rate plans to usage based billing tied to actual compute. GitHub followed weeks later with the same shift for Copilot, after years of quietly absorbing up to eight times the subscription value for heavy users. Analysts project that when pricing normalises to reflect real infrastructure costs, enterprise AI bills rise another 30 to 50 percent above current levels. …

Like the Internet bubble in 2000:

The parallel to the late 1990s is instructive. The internet was real technology. And it still produced a [stock market] crash. … The internet was real, it still crashed, and what followed wasn’t less internet — it was internet that finally paid for itself. AI is heading for the same sorting, and the divide is already visible.

Interesting times ahead for investors. A good hard crash in the AI stocks will not only hurt AI investors, but will suck liquidity out of the entire market as investors with loans scramble to meet margin calls, thereby driving down the prices of every other asset as well –especially the ones that are easiest to liquidate and have seen recent profits, such as gold and bitcoin. Bad debts are going to create a huge monetary problem, which will see emergency rate cuts and inflation — which will increase demand for gold and bitcoin.