Tesla’s New Roadster Takes Flight

Tesla’s New Roadster Takes Flight. By Christopher Otts at the WSJ.

After nine years, potentially millions of dollars in deposits and considerable hype, the Tesla Roadster is finally ready to launch—which it did.

The electric automaker on Thursday unveiled its second-generation sports car with a flourish of engineering prowess. Using SpaceX rocket technology, the angular sports car climbed a curved ramp and hurled itself to a controlled landing. Later, it leapt over five other Tesla vehicles while twisting in the air.

Three short clips:

 

The demonstration was held before a crowd of Tesla enthusiasts — some of whom paid $250,000 to reserve the car nine years ago — at a SpaceX rocket test site facility in McGregor, Texas. ….

The Roadster uses “a fan suction system” underneath to increase grip and downforce. Not long after that, the Roadster jumped through the air — as Musk long promised — using a pair of compressed-air thrusters.

Cost? No answer yet. Street legal? Depends which streets. Full self flying? No idea. Government involvement? As little as possible.

Turns out the future does have flying cars. Or at least, America does.

UPDATE:

Widespread despair among the young over AI: Just get to press Enter, instead of getting the chance to use their brains

Widespread despair among the young over AI: Just get to press Enter, instead of getting the chance to use their brains. By Gregory Conti.

Received a moving message from an aspiring mid-20s professional that, I think, captures an increasingly widespread despair among younger cohorts:

“It really saddens me when I hear about the work [senior people in the field] are doing. Their work seems interesting, and I’ll never get to do it.

The people in their fifties and sixties, they’re lucky. I’m even lucky. I feel bad for the kids who are fourteen. I at least got a chance to use my brain for one or two minutes, and that’s still priceless. I got to be human. I got to be more than just some puppet who presses Enter so something can think for me.

It’s very depressing looking at people who are sixty, who I would love to be in twenty years. But to know that I won’t get to do that because Dario said so, right? And, like, that’s actually heartbreaking.

It’s heartbreaking to know that no matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, you cannot add value as a human being in a year or two’s time.

It’s like hitting a brick wall. You feel no motivation to build the skill, to get better, to attain wisdom and knowledge. It seems worthless to you. And all the older people are telling you all your efforts might be worthless, and they don’t need you anymore. And they can just sit there and, you know, make money and leave you to drown.”

Looking on the Bright Side. By Kris Cvetko:

The value of a human being is so much greater than the ability to fill out Excel sheets, sit through Teams calls, and waste their potential in a corporate job.

I hear the concern loud and clear. People are afraid of losing their source of income. And understandably so, especially when that income depends on activities that have become mind-numbing corporate routines.

Should AI replace those activities? Absolutely. And rightfully so. …

AI is a mirror. And the fact that some work can be replaced by a statistical token prediction model says a lot more about the nature of that work than about the humans doing it. …

What might happen (if Allah wishes):

I’m talking about an economy where more of us become entrepreneurs, creators, and builders. Where individuals have access to capabilities and means of production that were completely out of reach for most of us just five years ago.

Our kids hate AI.

But we cannot put the genie back in the bottle — there are too many bottles and too many genies, i.e. someone else will use AI if we don’t.

Too late, we’re here!

Too late, we’re here! By Mr Lee Jasper in the UK.

Wave your flags. March up and down. Shout till you’re red, white and blue in the face.

Britain’s getting Blacker, browner and more mixed with every generation.

You ain’t turning that clock back. The future’s already being born. Grow the fuck up and deal with it.

 

(Will the “we’re here, we’re queer” crowd be forced into hiding?)

 

Will there be any ethnically or culturally white countries left in 50 years time? Will they just disappear under a demographic tide? Victors write history, so it will be seen as a good thing, an end to the evil of whiteness.

(Bonus observation: Is there any hateful thing you can say that doesn’t sound ok in today’s media if you say it about whites or white men?)

Additional 26,500 Afghan migrants under Albanese — but Morrison made the commitment

Additional 26,500 Afghan migrants under Albanese — but Morrison made the commitment. Ryan Dally canes Labor for importing incompatible migrants:

The Albanese Government has quietly approved an additional 26,500 Afghan migrants, family reunions and welfare support.

A spokesman said priority is given to “persecuted minorities, women, children, and LGBTQI+ individuals”

What changes when they land here? They still live the same lifestyle and then try to push it onto us.

Albanese? No, it was the uniparty. Brave AI:

The 26,500 Afghan places are real, but they are a Coalition-era pledge that the Albanese government carried forward, not a new Albanese approval.

In August 2021, the Morrison government first committed to 3,000 humanitarian places for Afghans, then expanded it in January and March 2022 to 26,500 humanitarian + 5,000 family visas over five years (2021-22 to 2025-26), including a 16,500-place special intake from July 2022.

The Albanese Government (in office from May 2022) inherited and continued that pre-existing commitment — it did not “quietly approve” it.

The Albanese government’s own distinct refugee-policy moves were raising the general humanitarian program to 20,000 places in 2023, and in August 2026 intervening to block Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s plan to cut it back to 13,750.

Craig Kelly points out that first Labor, then the Islamic Party, will benefit politically:

26,500 of which 95% will be voting Labor (or the Islamic Party preferencing Labor) in 4 years time.

Albanese’s migration policy is firstly a vote harvesting exercise for the Labor Party.

Ah, the wily ways of the bureaucracy and the uniparty.

France is reaching the end of the social democratic road

France is reaching the end of the social democratic road. By Brivael Le Pogam.

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.

I come from your future.

The promise:

In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. …

The promise was protection. …

The result:

Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.

The result is stagnation.

One more promise, one more regulation, one more bureaucrat:

The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.

 

Author’s illustration

 

Trust me. You don’t want to be France. …

Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.

What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation. …

The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you’re being offered is more of the same.

That’s the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears.

The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.

In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can’t afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.

Ask for less state, not more.

How it keeps happening, every time:

Forget ideology. Follow the incentives.

A politician’s horizon is the next election. Two years, four years, six at most. His reward comes from promising: free tuition, cancelled debt, guaranteed housing, a green transition paid for by someone else. The bill arrives in ten, twenty, thirty years. By then he’s retired, writing his memoir, giving paid speeches. He collects the applause today. You pay the invoice tomorrow. Any system where the person who makes the promise never pays for breaking it will produce endless broken promises. That isn’t a moral failure. It’s a mathematical certainty.

A bureaucrat is rewarded for the size of his budget and his team, not for solving the problem. If he solves it, his department shrinks. If it gets worse, he asks for more money, and he usually gets it. Failure is literally funded. …

When capital is allocated by politics instead of markets, the most profitable skill is no longer building. It’s lobbying. Getting close to the money. Writing the rule that crushes your competitor. Corruption stops being a bug and becomes the business model. …

The incentives of the left, which is now primarily the bureaucratic-welfare class:

Meanwhile, Europe’s fashionable economists offer the opposite diagnosis. Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman tell us the problem is that the state doesn’t take enough: more wealth taxes, more redistribution, more state. France has been running that experiment for fifty years. The result is one of the highest tax burdens in the developed world, record debt, and capital and talent leaving the country every year.

The same old ending:

History shows how this movie ends. Debt piles up until it can no longer be repaid. Currencies get debased. Then comes the reset, and it is rarely peaceful. Rome debased its coins for generations before it collapsed. Weimar’s hyperinflation came just before the darkest chapter of the 20th century. Empires that can’t stop spending don’t reform gently. They break.

We are approaching the end of that cycle. America now spends more on interest on its debt than on its military.

The US is one of the least affected. Check out China:

 

China is in a debt black hole from which there is no escape.

 

A country that borrows heavily from the future and cannot possibly pay it back, or keep its citizens at the standard of living afforded by the credit card, sometimes resorts to war — for example Nazi Germany 1939.

hat-tip David Archibald

Has Sweden Passed the Point of NO RETURN?

Has Sweden Passed the Point of NO RETURN? By Iben Thranholm in First Things.

For decades, Sweden had perhaps the most open immigration policy and the strongest commitment to tolerance and multiculturalism in the West. That changed in 2015, when the Sweden Democrats (SD), once treated as political pariahs, pulled Sweden’s major parties — including the Social Democrats and the Moderates — toward a far more restrictive immigration policy. What was once radical became mainstream. [That is, SD started pulling too many votes from the established parties who caused the problem.]

For a decade, almost everything went SD’s way. The party pressed its advantage and demanded stricter assimilation, calling for an end to multiculturalism, a ban on wearing the hijab in public, and a new emphasis on remigration. … Permanent residence permits for asylum-related stays were abolished. Citizenship became harder to obtain. The government began to offer financial incentives to immigrants who voluntarily return to their countries of origin. Many Swedes agreed that the country needed to slam on the brakes after years of almost unchecked immigration.

But it appears that that course correction may have come too late. By the end of 2025, 2.94 million of Sweden’s nearly 11 million inhabitants were foreign-born or born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents.

The foreigners vote, and gave the left the winning margin in recent elections:

In the September 13 election, … the right-wing government lost its majority … In 786 electoral districts where at least half the population was foreign-born or had two foreign-born parents, the center-left gained some 73,000 votes compared with 2022. That shift alone exceeded the roughly 50,000-vote margin between the two blocs nationwide. …

SD’s own party secretary, Mattias Bäckström Johansson, acknowledged after the election that the proposed hijab ban and the push for remigration may have mobilized immigrant voters. …

Mosques in several Swedish cities began teaching democracy in the run-up to the election. Uppsala’s mosque held a “voting school.” Gothenburg’s deployed election ambassadors and published its own voting guide, with sections on the hijab and religious schools. The Islamic Association in Malmö worked to raise turnout in Rosengård.

In one sense, this was exactly what integration experts had dreamed of for years. But many of these voters are not secular liberals who merely happen to be Muslim. They vote as Muslims, seeking to protect their Islamic way of life.

What do Muslims want? This is a democracy after all…

For Sweden, this marks a new phase. The question is no longer how to stop immigration, but what these Muslim voters want.

Other countries offer a hint. A 2015 Danish survey found that 40 percent of Muslims believed Danish law should at least partly be based on the Qur’an, while a British survey found that 23 percent of its participants supported Shari’a law in parts of Britain. ….

This year, the Social Democrats and the Left Party … began producing campaign material in Arabic….

Parties may soon discover that votes can be won by accommodating religious demands over schools, dress, and family life — precisely where traditional Islam collides with secular Swedish norms. No Islamist party is needed. Existing parties simply want to win elections. …

Coming soon to a country you happen to be living in?

Sweden’s election may be the canary in the coal mine. What happened there can happen in any Western democracy with a large immigrant electorate. The secular liberal democracy many thought untouchable may become a peaceful route to power for a faith that shows little interest in retreating into the private sphere, as proponents of multiculturalism would have hoped.

So predictable, so predicted. Replacement theory in action.

Hope those Swedish lefties enjoyed their moment on priding themselves of building the world’s “humanitarian superpower” (that’s what the called themselves). Look at Egypt — still a few white Christians left.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Incandescent bulbs are back because LEDs cause health problems

Incandescent bulbs are back because LEDs cause health problems. By Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards at The Highwire.

Throughout history, humans have lived under two lights. Sun and fire.

The incandescent bulb arrived in the 1800s … Then, about fifteen years ago, we traded that warm light for something our biology had yet to experience: the LED. As is the case with many novelties, no one checked into what it might do to us.

The swap from incandescent to LED bulbs became mandatory, thanks to a 2007 energy bill signed by George W. Bush. … LEDs use about 75% less electricity than incandescent, they last for years, and old bulbs waste most of their energy as heat. Without much thought, the switch looked like pure progress to many.

But then a funny thing happened:

Last month, when the Department of Energy testified to Congress in support of bringing back incandescent bulbs, it caught the attention of those of us against LED….

Light is not just something that we see. Light is biological information, and every cell in our body evolved under the sun and the fire, both of which pour out a full, continuous spectrum that is heavy in warm reds and invisible near-infrared light. The incandescent bulb, for all of its efficiency, is itself a small, tamed fire. They called that waste. But the “wasted” heat that regulators scolded for its infrared radiation is the same frequency that has bathed our bodies for centuries.

Because:

LED light is altogether different, making light through a narrow electronic process that spikes strong in the blue part of the light spectrum, and emits almost no infrared at all. Even worse, it flickers rapidly, switching on and off hundreds of times per second. The flicker is too fast to register with our conscious eye, but it is not too fast to wreak havoc on our nervous system. …

Blue-heavy light from typical LEDs lowers the membrane potential in our mitochondria, thus impacting the electrical charge that lets our mitochondria produce ATP, the energy currency of the cell. Along with that, blue light in the evening suppresses melatonin and disrupts circadian rhythms, which in turn affects sleep, hormone balance, and overnight cellular repair. And studies on animals reveal that blue light causes retinal damage. Eye damage is significant because half of the human brain is wired, either directly or indirectly, to process what it receives through the eyes. Stare too long at a device and, yes, your eyes are wrecked. …

Dr. Jack Kruse … insists that our mitochondria respond directly to the light that hits our skin and eyes, and that the red and near-infrared wavelengths they need are exactly those emitted by incandescent light. The LED light does not have this. … Now, our bodies are starved of them all day under blue-heavy light, leading to exhaustion, shallow sleep, and a dry, dead feeling behind the eyes, with no explanation for where it came from.

Couldn’t be bothered with a full-on science video today. This is breathtakingly short:

ChatGPT:

There is credible evidence for specific applications, including some forms of wound healing, oral mucositis associated with cancer therapy, certain pain and inflammatory conditions, hair growth and aspects of skin treatment. However, study methods and doses vary greatly, and results are not uniformly convincing.

Evidence for broad claims such as extending lifespan, treating systemic mitochondrial dysfunction, preventing dementia or substantially improving general health is not established. Brain photobiomodulation, including 810–1070 nm devices, is biologically plausible and has encouraging early studies, but human trials remain relatively small and exploratory. Animal Alzheimer’s research is considerably stronger than the human evidence.”

I switched to incandescents in my office a couple of months ago. Turns out you can still buy them at Bunnings, as specialty spotlight bulbs (Osram Concentra Spot R63).

Regulators versus Builders

Regulators versus Builders. By Wessie du Toit at UnHerd.

Businessman James Dyson, famed for his bagless vacuum cleaners, … has long argued that Britain’s problems are tied to the character of its elites, who esteem knowledge work and cultural literacy above the hands-on business of technology, invention, entrepreneurship and trade.

In 2004, he even stormed out of his post as chairman of London’s Design Museum, complaining that it had become a “style showcase” chasing visitor numbers with frivolous exhibitions about flower-arranging and designer shoes, rather than a place to promote serious engineering.

In many Western countries, there is now a prominent dividing line between, broadly, managerial cultures and entrepreneurial ones.

  • The former are those employees in institutional settings — corporations, the public sector, NGOs, and what Dyson calls an “Oxford-Westminster bubble” — who value credentials, are fond of rules, and assume that the world is shaped by ideas and narratives.
  • By contrast, those of an entrepreneurial persuasion are interested in the material facts of how things actually work, while chafing against rules and prizing innovation and individual ambition.

Consider the coalition that voted for Donald Trump in 2024. It included people who work in traditional industries involving cars, machinery or oil and gas, as well as those who do business outside of corporate structures, such as family-owned enterprises and venture capitalists. These groups were united in their resentment of a professional managerial class, stereotypically inhabiting a world of yoga studios and DEI policies, which stifled them with regulations and liberal mores.

The revolt of Britain’s entrepreneurs indicates that a similar tension has emerged here. Terms of opprobrium such as “lanyard class” and “the Blob” try to capture a middle-class, managerial ethos that now runs through the country’s institutions like a stick of rock. Its priority is not how the economic and material underpinnings of modern life operate, but ensuring that they conform to the appropriate standards mandated by equalities law, environmental regulations and progressive cultural etiquette. …

It is fundamentally a question of attitudes and social environment, and can therefore provide the basis of a much wider division. Less privileged staff at managerial institutions are likely to absorb the dominant assumptions of those settings, while people of widely differing means and backgrounds can identify with a message of self-reliance, ambition and scorn for meddling bureaucrats.

Too many people telling others what to do and taking a cut, too few building and making. No wonder productivity is down everywhere.

Everywhere it seems the issue is parasites versus doers. Our current system has allowed too many parasites too accumulate.

US Military has changed direction: ‘No Beardos, No Weirdos’

US Military has changed direction: ‘No Beardos, No Weirdos’. By Mike Fredenburg at The Epoch Times.

From Secretary of War Hegseth’s Sept. 30 State of the Force speech:

“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.”

“Do unto your unit as you would have done unto your own child’s unit. Would you want them serving in a unit where standards were lowered to meet quotas? Or a unit where leaders were promoted for reasons other than merit, performance, or war fighting? The answer is not just no. The answer is hell no.” …

He framed last year’s historic speech as a break from “the Defense Department of old” and “liberation day [from the DEI/woke mindset],” stating that the War Department’s mission was “war fighting. Preparing to fight and preparing to win, unrelenting, unapologetic, and uncompromising in that single pursuit.” …

Hegseth said the turnaround is “wildly popular both inside our ranks and with young Americans looking from the outside,” and that retention is at record rates. As an implied rebuke to the exaggerated narrative of how bad things had been aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, he noted the ship had an 84.4 percent reenlistment rate – among the highest of any aircraft carrier despite being at sea for more than 260 days. …

Hegseth noted that when it comes to recruiting, every branch has been setting records since President Donald Trump won in November 2024 … All five active-duty services met or exceeded their fiscal 2025 recruiting goals, the strongest department-wide performance in about 15 years. …

Hegseth attributes the success in recruiting and retention to restored confidence in military leadership rather than bonuses: Americans enlist and stay, he argued, when they are led by “strong patriots, not by weak weirdos,” and when promotion is merit-based. …

Some specifics:

About 10 percent of generals and admirals have been removed, and general-officer billets cut by another 10 percent, for a reduction of about 20 percent.

Standards from around 1990 are back, including gender-neutral combat standards set at the previous male level, a combat field test, two fitness tests a year, height and weight standards, and daily physical training.

Diversity quotas, identity observances, and social-emotional leader evaluations have been dropped in favor of merit-based promotion and a performance test for colonels seeking general rank.

Military sexual assaults and suicides are down, and black and female recruiting are up even without quotas.

Commanders report more authority, capability, and backing than at any point in their careers.

Time for the Liberal Party to Expel Malcolm Turnbull

Time for the Liberal Party to Expel Malcolm Turnbull. By Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian.

The rot grew when many in the Liberal Party abandoned cultural convictions. The fact that many Liberals took leadership roles championing the Voice was a betrayal of the most basic tenet for conservatives: that every human being must be treated equally under our founding document, the Constitution.

The Liberal Party was shamed into acting left by the media, led by the ABC:

If you didn’t support the dogma on net zero, you were treated as a philistine. If you didn’t agree with the voice, you were likely labelled a racist. This is how the left treats freedom of speech — agree with it, or it will shame you into silence or submission.

The complete surrender of the Liberal Party on traditional centre-right cultural issues was so abject that some Liberals — even former prime ministers — adopted a deliberate strategy.

Don’t talk about the culture wars, they said. Instead, discussing immigration became racist, expressing gender-critical views was hateful and questioning DEI was straight-out oppression.

The problem for the Liberal Party is its left flank. Can we please stop calling them “moderates”; there is nothing moderate about them. More comfortable shuffling around the left ecosystem of Labor-Green-teals, they cannot avoid responsibility for the cultural and economic carnage under way in this country.

The best measure of the Liberals’ left-wing flank is the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation on the right. Had the Liberal Party remained a broad church where both conservative and small-l liberals shared the pulpit, it would not be in such dire straits today. …

Three steps to rebuild the Liberal Party:

  1. Expel Malcolm Turnbull from the Liberal Party. … If Turnbull wants to play martyr, let him. It can’t be any worse than it is right now.He is a central part of the left milieu, beloved by the ABC and every climate change zealot, cheered by Labor every time he attacks a Liberal.
  2. The Liberals must tell voters how they will deal with One Nation. Not talking about the elephant in the room won’t work. Taylor tried that at CPAC on the weekend, and it was a disaster. …
  3. If Taylor wants to reconstitute the broad church, it is likely he can only do it by ditching his left flank and embracing his right. …

Where we are now

In Australia, fortunately we are a few years behind the US. Add a few years to these dates:

The US:

In any case, what was center in the 1990s and early 2000s is now called “far-right” and Nazi-adjacent by our left-captured institutions and media:

The country has been run by a broad church of left-wing forces, not just in federal parliament, but across our major institutions, from the ABC to universities to schools and bureaucracies. And that has left the country in a shambles, economically and culturally.

While Hanson and her party have considerable weaknesses, politics is a relative game — many seem to think One Nation can’t possibly be any worse than the major parties. As one Australian reader said recently: “I don’t necessarily want the full Hanson, but I want enough of her to course correct for what is going on today.”

The left has become increasingly divorced from reality, with endless narratives that are plain wrong or at least rely on lying by omission. The rest of us normal people, more in touch with reality, accumulate on the right side of politics — the non-left. If the Liberals remain partly captured by the left, that just leaves the Nationals and One Nation to vote for.

Australian living standards have slipped 40% and we have deindistrialized, because our ruling class didn’t do due diligence on net-zero

Australian living standards have slipped 40% and we have deindistrialized, because our ruling class didn’t do due diligence on net-zero. By Alan Moran in The Spectator.

Australian governments’ annualised subsidy to renewables is $25 billion (equivalent to about 40 per cent of the Defence budget). This includes just under $7 billion in state government subsidies. … [It] does not include the subsidies (over $700 million per year) to aluminium and other energy-intensive operations, made uncompetitive by Net Zero policies; nor does it include the subsidies to EVs, which amount to about $1.4 billion annually. It also excludes the annual costs, first imposed by the Howard government 20 years ago, of meeting greenhouse gas emission targets by locking up land from development.

Nearly all the reduction in Australia’s greenhouse emissions come in land use change — principally by stopping land clearing, but that’s only because nearly all the desirable land had been cleared by 2005 anyway. (By the way, that was measured by a government program called FullCAM, which I wrote and largely designed.)

Australia’s claimed total reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, 94 per cent have come from land-use restraints, which Barnaby Joyce claimed have cost landowners $100 billion. …

And for this minor effect, Australia de-industrialized and has world-leading electricity prices? Yep:

In real terms, Australia’s electricity prices rose 50-80 per cent over the past 20 years. Countries with much less rigorous emission control policies saw only modest increases (the US), no increase (Vietnam), or lower prices (India).

And far from becoming a magnet for industries seeking cheap power, the latest being AI, Australia has seen much of its manufacturing and refining capacity close down, with previously world-beating smelters now in government hospital care. …

The carbon dioxide theory of global warming is wrong — no one in the Western ruling class did any due diligence, and it is only supported by climate models made by government-funded scientists. As Sir Humphrey explained in Yes Minister, never hold an inquiry unless you know what the answer is going to be:

And the easiest way to ensure the outcome is to control who is doing the inquiring. Climate scientists who disagreed with the carbon dioxide theory were sacked starting in 1982 (with Sherwood Idso), and within a decade only yes-men remained. Those of us who disagreed have been side-lined, kept out of the public eye, ignored, fired, denigrated and silenced.

You don’t have to be climate scientist to notice that:

  1. The predictions of the alarmists have not come true (snow in Britain, Arctic, Kilimanjaro, etc.). So many failed predictions.
  2. Climate history was rewritten to suit the carbon dioxide theory. (Not sure? Just check the past temperature record in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990 against its 2003 Third Assessment Report and what passes for the past now.)
  3. The measurement of global temperature is performed by the bodies pushing the carbon dioxide theory, and their methods are opaque. (Yet even so, the rate of temperature increase they have supposedly measured is considerably less than the minimum predicted in the First Assessment Report in 1990.)

And how much has Australia’s ruling class sunk on this junk theory?

Over the past 20 years, in $2025 terms, Australia has spent between $200 and 240 billion on renewable energy. Without subsidies, none of this would likely have happened. Misallocating what would otherwise be income-enhancing investment capital has contributed to lower investment levels in recent years, resulting in, at best, sluggish economic growth.

Had the money instead been spent on conventional, reliable power stations, it would have bought 40 2GW coal generators – actually twice the current national capacity – or 15 2GW nuclear generators. With coal, our lowest-in-the-world costs provides a comparative advantage.

Now we are poorer:

Per capita income is now declining and, as a nation, our living standards have slipped over the past decade from parity with the US average to levels 40 per cent lower.

Stupidity and intellectual laziness have consequences.

The public however, like with The Voice, have shown good sense. With the exception of 2007, we have voted against net zero at every single Federal election.  Whenever there was a significant difference in policy, we voted against the warmers.

The left built a machine for turning a father’s love for his children into prison time.

The left built a machine for turning a father’s love for his children into prison time. By Bettina Arndt at Quadrant.

In New South Wales alone, more than 100,000 domestic violence orders are in force at any one time — more than double the number seven years ago. …

Mothers are mostly the ones protected, but since the children’s arrangements run through her, contact with the children stops too. A father is cut off from his children immediately, with no trial, no evidence tested, no finding made. This is state-imposed alienation. How many children it touches, nobody knows, because the government that runs the system has never bothered to count. People everywhere know it is happening and no one wants to talk about it.

Nobody, that is, except David Smith. He is the West Australian dad campaigning to expose what is going on. Boy, is this a man with a mission. He wrote three books and then created an amazing podcast series — All Kids Lives Matter — which is a data-driven investigation into “How Australia’s family-facing systems fail the children they claim to protect — and what the evidence says would fix them.” …

A legal machine came into existence:

Something changed in this country, and it changed fast. In 1987, NSW Local Courts issued 1,462 apprehended violence orders, which at the time were available only between people in a domestic relationship. In 2025, 52,757 domestic AVOs were commenced …

This expansion happened while physical violence was falling, according to the government’s own ABS Personal Safety Survey. For men, the rate fell from 10% to 6.1% since 2005. For women, it fell from 4.7% to 2.9%. Those figures cover violence from anyone, not just partners. …

A system expanding this dramatically while violence declines is not obviously tracking danger. It is tracking something else: policy settings, definitions, and a bureaucracy that keeps growing, regardless of what is happening in people’s homes. ...

Rarely any trail or testing of evidence, just bureaucratic machinery with shocking consequences:

For the great majority of cases, no one ever tests the evidence. … In NSW, an interim AVO can be made “whether or not the defendant is present or has been given notice”. Get that — the bloke doesn’t even need to be told he’s about to be done over!

One study of Victorian courts, reported by the Australian Law Reform Commission, timed the median protection order hearing at three minutes. Three minutes to decide whether a father loses his children. …

Men need to know that living with an AVO means being perpetually at risk of being charged with a criminal offence. All it takes is a breach — namely, any contact with the protected person that the order prohibits. And because children are automatically caught up in these orders, that prohibition usually extends to them too. For a father separated from his children, that means even a text wishing his own child happy birthday can constitute a breach. And a breach is a crime. He can be arrested. He can end up in jail.

This makes ordinary contact a minefield, no matter how careful a man tries to be. A determined ex-partner can turn up at his workplace with the children in tow. She can arrange for them to “bump into” him at the shops. However it happens, the moment he responds — waves, says hello, sends a text — he has breached the order. And just like that, Dad is safely out of the way. Behind bars. …

About 39,600 defendants faced criminal courts in 2023-2024 with breaching a violence order as their principal offence. … More than one hundred people, every single day, walk into a criminal courtroom because of a document no criminal court ever issued. [David Smith] explains:

“A document issued fast, in a civil court, on the civil standard, is the tripwire for mandatory prison. That is the hybrid. Civil to obtain. Criminal to break.”

That design choice — civil to obtain, criminal to break — is the hinge the whole appalling system turns on.

It’s the narrative, interpreted outrageously:

What makes my blood boil is that the public assumes this entire system exists to protect women from dangerous men. That is the story everyone has been told, and it is why almost no one questions how the system actually operates. But the reality is most of these orders have nothing to do with violence at all. …

54% involved an assault charge. 35% involved intimidation or stalking … [which] typically involves threats, intimidation and verbal abuse, not stalking in any conventional sense. And 40% involved a charge of breaching an existing order. … These categories overlap. …

Once a matter reaches the family court, the definition widens again. The Family Law Act defines family violence partly as behaviour that coerces or controls a family member, or “causes the family member to be fearful”. There is no express requirement that the fear be reasonable. The examples run from assault to repeated derogatory taunts, all under one label.

The ever-expanding label “domestic violence” is doing enormous, undifferentiated work. It covers everything from a punch to claims of a heated argument over money, and the system responds to the label the same way regardless of what actually happened. …

The biggest risk factor for delinquency and crime is a fatherless upbringing, but the system encourages it:

The moment one of these orders is made — often before the father even knows it exists — it typically comes with a standard condition: no contact at all. Not reduced contact. Not supervised contact. None. …

By the time anyone looks, a child may have already lost one to two years with a parent — on the strength of an allegation nobody ever tested. And that absence doesn’t stay neutral. Family courts routinely lean on what’s called the “status quo” — the arrangement the child has already been living under — as evidence of what’s now stable and familiar for them. The system creates the absence, then claims it serves the child’s best interests. That isn’t child protection, it’s child abuse. And it’s a system marking its own homework.

From there, the pathway often leads to supervised contact, where the parent — usually a father — pays for the privilege of seeing his children. Often seeing them in some sterile, fluorescent-lit room at a contact centre, a stranger with a clipboard sitting in, every word and gesture noted down, ready to be used against him in court. …

Shockingly, 46% of adults in NSW prisons are now on remand: legally innocent and awaiting trial — the highest proportion ever recorded … About half of the growth in remand over the past two years is due to more domestic violence defendants being held in custody before their court date, and one in three adults on remand is now there over an alleged domestic violence offence.

Imagine if this became a political issue. Only One Nation has the guts to oppose the feminists. (Pauline Hanson mentioned that men are also victims of domestic violence a couple of months ago, and was duly shouted down by the usual suspects.)

The victims of this feminist machine are mostly white men, so who cares? You can be sure it is selectively enforced — men from favored groups either don’t get charged or are punished far less. For example, this week Jeffrey Alan Brown was found guilty of raping four kids over six years in WA, but “Respected elder’s rape sentence reduced for ‘significant connection to country’” — any excuse will do. Imagine if people from any group other than white men were being treated so unfairly and then imprisoned and alienated from their children? Stolen children times 100!

20 year old girls — smart, capable, hard working and cute — can’t get a date

20 year old girls — smart, capable, hard working and cute — can’t get a date.

What’s wrong with Western society we can’t even get this right?

The dating market is shifting quite rapidly at the moment. While the Wentworth Report doesn’t normally pay it much attention, the reasons are inappropriate policies from the left.

Chris Hatch:

I am surrounded by 20 year old girls in my life that are smart, capable, hard working and cute. Nobody is dating them. Not sure what the deal is, but I don’t get it.

Amy Curtis:

Because young men have learned that if they date a girl and it goes bad, she can come back and accuse them of rape two years after the fact.

She can strangle his children and the media will circle the wagons to protect her.

She can divorce him and take half of everything.

That’s why.

Commenters:

Man can’t get a date: “What’s wrong with me?”

Woman can’t get a date: “What’s wrong with men?” …

Misandry has consequences.

Related:

Merry Old England has a new Mayor

Merry Old England has a new Mayor.

Ealing is a district and major metropolitan center located in West London, approximately 7.5 miles (12.1 km) west of Charing Cross. In the western part of Greater London:

 

What a difference government policy can make:

hat-tip David Archibald