Australia

A Light the Years Can Never Dim

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 12:36:46 +1100

Tomorrow (October 13) marks what would have been Margaret Thatcher's 100th birthday.

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hen Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came into office, the Western world was at a low ebb. The 1973 oil crisis had created stagflation. The US had comprehensively lost the Vietnam War. There was a pervasive sense of malaise, embodied in the high-minded but ineffectual presidency of Jimmy Carter. Britain had just gone cap-in-hand to the IMF. Communist insurgencies were rampant in Central America, there were Marxist regimes in southern Africa, and there was a Russian puppet in Kabul. A decade later, the world was transformed. It was “morning in America”. Britain had won the Falklands War and had become the miracle economy of Europe. And the Berlin Wall was toppling. As John O’Sullivan makes clear in his magisterial book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were the key to victory in the Cold War because each saw it in essentially moral terms, good versus evil, or at the very least, light grey versus very dark grey. And each had a clear program of action. The Cold War was won because Britain and America strengthened their military, revitalised their economies, and restored their national and cultural self-confidence. Eventually, the relative success of Western countries, compared to the relative poverty and persecution of Eastern ones, produced an irresistible popular tide that led to the collapse of the old Soviet bloc. But that was then. This is now. Now, we are in the throes of a second Cold War. The democratic West is under challenge from a militarist dictatorship in Moscow; an Islamist dictatorship in Tehran; and a communist dictatorship in Beijing. Russia wants to dominate Eastern Europe. China wants to be the world’s top power and to create a world very much in its own likeness, with “the party over all”. And Iran wants an apocalyptic global caliphate. All three malign powers are loosely coordinating with each other, united in their hatred of the West. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]n all this, complacency is our biggest enemy. The current battlefield stalemate in Ukraine; Israel’s recent stunning military coups against its enemies; and the absence, for now, of escalation across the Taiwan Strait, does not mean that things could not move quickly to a potentially existential crisis. There are three key differences between Cold War I and Cold War II. First, communist China is a first-rate economy that’s rapidly building a military to match. It’s deeply integrated into the world economy and there’s a significant Chinese diaspora in all of the main countries of the West. All-up, communist China is a far more formidable competitor than the old Soviet Union ever was.

Gross Domestic Product, in trillions of dollars. (World Bank).

Second, the West, the Anglosphere especially, and President Trump’s actions notwithstanding, is comparatively economically stagnant, comparatively societally fragmented, and culturally confused as never before. The Marxists who failed to get the working class to revolt in the name of equality have been much better at persuading the middle class to revolt in the name of saving the planet and ending discrimination. The politics of climate and identity are driving the Anglosphere especially into grave economic and societal self harm: in the insane rush to replace reliable fossil fuel power with intermittent wind and solar power, which can run a house but not an economy; and mass immigration, that’s well intentioned but is making our countries poorer and less cohesive. And the readiness to be self-critical, one of Western civilisation’s greatest strengthsthat I used to think would guarantee our survival, has degenerated into a destructive self-loathing, in the Anglosphere especially. America is angst-ridden over slavery; Britain is angst-ridden over the Empire; and Australia is angst-ridden over the dispossession of the original Aboriginal inhabitants, even though no countries on Earth are less racist and more colour-blind. And third, with Trump a partial exception, there is no leadership. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]s there a national leader anywhere in a major Western country with a coherent plan to revitalise the economy, to reinvigorate institutions, and to restore national pride? And sure, people like Macron and Starmer will talk along these lines, but by failing to control immigration, by failing to cut taxes and regulations, and by imposing politically correct straitjackets on institutions they are actually making a bad situation worse. Other than in America, is there anywhere in the Western world an elected and accountable government that’s clearly in charge of the country, as opposed to a clerisy of judges, bureaucrats and so-called experts? As for Trump, there’s much to his credit: “drill baby, drill”, only two genders, “build the wall”, making government more efficient, and driving woke ideology out of business and out of the military – all excellent. But why antagonise Canada, mocking a great country as the 51st state; and why antagonise India, which is the essential democratic counterweight to China? Of course, there’s more good than bad; but, as a character, the President is hardly in the league of Reagan and Thatcher. Yet while there are few grounds for optimism, there are reasons for hope. As Thatcher said, the facts are conservative. Sometime before the last heavy industry closes, people will realise that cutting emissions is not nearly as important as reliable and affordable power. Sometime after enough doctors have been sued for malpractice, people will realise that it’s best to stick with the body they’ve been born into. And sometime as the military challenge intensifies, people will realise that freedom is worth striving for and that there are worse things than death. Because for all the apparatus of repression, and for all the brainwashing of ideology, there is a yearning for freedom and an instinct for decency in almost every human heart; no less so in other countries than in our own. As O’Sullivan points out, in closing his marvellous book, we have one advantage that Reagan and Thatcher lacked: we have their example. It’s the close study of those who rose so magnificently to the challenges of their time that should inspire us to overcome the challenges of ours. I might close on this note: I know we should be cautious in recruiting the dead to fight the battles of living but I feel sure that a reincarnated Margaret Thatcher would utterly reject a policy that put climate action ahead of energy security; would not tolerate for a second the peaceful invasion of Britain now happening across the English Channel; and would not be bluffed by likes of Putin out of giving every possible help to gallant Ukraine.

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The Wartime Statesmanship of Éamon de Valera

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:32:51 +1100

Recent research in the Irish archives has uncovered previously unknown wartime correspondence by the then Prime Minister, Éamon de Valera. The letters demonstrate the integrity and wisdom he brought to Ireland’s international diplomacy, and leave us to contemplate what might have been had his advice been taken at the time.

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Confidential Ref No: T-EDV-1942-613

Éamon de Valera Taoiseach Ireland 20 May 1942 Franklin Roosevelt President United States of America Dear President Roosevelt, The war that now exists between the United States of America and the Empire of Japan—brought about by the attack on Pearl Harbour, and by the quasi-warlike embargo which preceded the attack—is likely to go on for countless years and to cost countless lives. There will be a concomitant injury to civilians and civilian property on both sides, as well as substantial consequential injuries to non-belligerents, e.g., the USSR and Ireland. Doolittle’s Raid has achieved its military objective. Retribution for Pearl Harbour is now a fact. They have killed your people, and now, you have killed theirs—the numbers are roughly equal. No lasting peace can be, or has ever been, achieved by making exactitudes of retribution a precondition for peace. Thus, national honour must be held to be satisfied. They have rounded up your nationals, and you are putting in motion plans to round up theirs. Any further horrors of war can serve no useful purpose. Is it not now time to consider an alternative to war? Surely you cannot seriously aim at Japan’s (much less, the Axis’) actual surrender? Japan’s armed forces have captured territories all over Asia and the Pacific, and those forces hold those territories by the same warrant under which your nation and the European imperial powers hold and have held such territories there—all far beyond your American and their European homelands. Japan’s honour will not permit her to surrender. And even if the people of Japan were willing to do so, any such decision would be blocked by the Japanese militarists who control the same powerful forces that attacked Pearl Harbour. It follows that the only way to achieve such a surrender would be for your armed forces to recapture your lost territories, and then to go on and to conquer Japan’s home islands, and, in the process, to destroy Japan’s industry, merchant marine, cities, and population. You do not have the ability to achieve these goals, and were you to try to do so—or worse, were you to achieve them—the horrific price would leave your good name and the good name of the United States covered in the blood of millions of innocents. I urge you to choose peace and to open negotiations with accredited representatives of the Empire of Japan. On behalf of Douglas Hyde, the President of Ireland, I offer you my own government’s good offices towards the pacific mediation, arbitration, and settlement of the war now existing between your nation and the Empire of Japan. I would urge you to respond to my overtures with all the alacrity that this terrible emergency permits, as my loyal opposition, as well as certain public charities, are calling for a boycott against the goods of belligerents and those selling arms to belligerents. In doing this, the opposition might act in concert with partisans of their political persuasion in other neutral jurisdictions. Should it come to this, I trust you will understand that we intend no animus against the People of the United States, and our policy would treat both your nation and the Empire of Japan even-handedly. Sincerely, Éamon de Valera cc: Lt Gen Yoshitsugu Tatekawa, Ambassador of the Empire of Japan to the USSR

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Confidential Ref No: T-EDV-1945-204

Éamon de Valera Taoiseach Ireland 3 April 1945

Winston Churchill Franklin Roosevelt Joseph Stalin

Prime Minister President Premier & Secretary

United Kingdom United States of America Soviet Union

Dear Heads of Government of the Major Allied Powers, Your armies are now in your enemies’ territories. It is only a matter of days, perhaps hours, until your total victory is assured. You have not only smashed your enemies’ ground forces and navies, but you have also decimated their industrial, technological, and agricultural capacity. In the process, your bombs and other terrible weapons have killed uncounted numbers of civilians—nationals of the Axis Powers—and also those displaced persons in their care in camps around their territories. Your operations officers have made no efforts to warn nearby civilians when bombing Axis military targets—nor have you made any transparent, public efforts to explain how you have identified your “military targets” at all. Whatever your past justifications may have been, at a time when your political existence was put at risk by attacks emanating from the coordinated military forces of the Axis Powers, those past risks are now entirely (or nearly entirely) attenuated. You and your territories are no longer at any substantial risk (except for an occasional V-2 rocket—which are unguided and frequently land in little populated areas). In these circumstances, your continued use of massively devastating weapons—which, of necessity, must kill many wholly innocent nationals of the Axis Powers—is no longer justified (to the extent their use was ever justified). Because you are no longer at any substantial risk, any attacks on your part which knowingly kill civilians (including women and children) and destroy their little remaining property and food, is wholly disproportionate as a matter of public international law. Any such attacks ordered by you and your subordinates will subject you and your governments to sanctions by international institutions, Ireland, and other neutral governments (after a proper investigation in due course of law following principles of natural justice). Based on nothing more than the Axis governments’ continuing refusal to accept your unprecedented demand for an unconditional surrender, you could end hostilities by unnecessarily murdering the last soldier of the Axis forces. For that reason, you could mindlessly continue to kill their soldiers, and for that reason, you could continue to kill their civilians (incidental to military necessity). But it is your legal and moral duty not to do so. Rather, you should assume the burden and role of statesmen and pursue peace with your former opponents (whoever they might be and without respect to their former, current, or future political aims). For those reasons among others, you must declare a cease fire: unilaterally if needs be. After the cease fire, you must begin a peace process (even if, at first, you lack cooperation from your opponents). The first steps in that peace process are: to recognize the Axis Powers’ governments (even if not democratic); to allow all parties to return to their borders as they existed prior to the outbreak of these past regrettable hostilities; and finally, to allow international trade to flow freely so that hungry innocents may be fed, clothed, and receive medicine. It is true that this might allow (some of) your enemies to rearm. But my own experts assure me that this possibility is minor. Inconsequential, abstract, and theoretical future risks such as potential rearmament cannot overcome the pressing, real, and current demands of suffering humanity and international law. Each of you must: stop your bombings; declare a ceasefire; end all blockades and trade restrictions; permit the representatives of the Axis governments to reenter the world of diplomacy, finance, and international institutions; and finally, allow the long-suffering peoples of the Axis nations to feed themselves—something they cannot do as long as your bombs continue to rain down on them. Once these basic steps are taken, a lasting peace based on mutual respect and recognition will surely come—as night follows day. Finally, on behalf of Douglas Hyde, the President of Ireland, I offer you my own government’s good offices towards the pacific mediation, arbitration, and settlement of any international disputes. Sincerely, Éamon de Valera cc: His Excellency Eduard Hempel, German Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary Seth Barrett Tillman is Associate Professor, Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology, Ireland / Scoil an Dlí agus na Coireolaíochta Ollscoil Mhá Nuad. The second of these historical parodies or “letters” was first published in the Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2015.

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What Now for the Jew-Baiters?

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:07:41 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]his week in New York, on the second anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel, hundreds of Jew-haters hit the streets to celebrate their terrorist heroes. You know the scene all too well by now. Unkempt college students wrapped up like keffiyeh mummies, young and mighty Muslims, mouldy ex-hippies, a sea of Palestinian flags, chants and signs calling for a global intifada and Israel’s destruction, echoing drums, the occasional harassment of an outspoken Israeli supporter. The New York Times thought it a fitting day to run an opinion piece titled “Israel Cannot Go On Winning Like This,” in which Mairav Zonszein levels all the worn out, false charges against the Jewish state. But she gets this one thing right: “Israel has been brazen, unpredictable and, until the recent proposed cease-fire, all but unstoppable.” Only she says it like it’s a bad thing. Because if you suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome, it is. Israel’s indefatigability in matters of self-preservation is your number-one problem. It’s also what has made possible the first seemingly real opportunity for regional peace. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]f that peace arrives, what will become of the anti-Israel mob? We know that the prospect of peace hasn’t slowed them down. Why would it? They’re calling for bloodshed, not harmony. But an end to the war is a different story. Peace would mean that Israel won, and there’s little point in cheering on defeated and disbanded terrorist armies that have surrendered in the fight for your cause—your lost cause. Israel’s victory is the mob’s defeat. Sure, those in denial would rage on a bit longer. But that won’t last forever, especially among the mob’s dominating youth faction. College kids (and Greta Thunberg) sign on to protests the way the rest of us choose TV shows. They’re stuck with whatever is currently running. Anti-Zionism will be taken off the air. Almost literally, in fact. Because peace would also be the end of the foreign-backed social media campaign that’s been feeding the TikTok generation its anti-Israel propaganda. China and Russia will continue to stoke anti-American causes online, but they’ll need better material than a recent war in which an American ally was victorious. And their young audience will again follow their lead. The rest of the apoplectic Israel-hating coalition gained its courage from the size of the horde they were a part of. If that’s thinned out by the students’ departure, they’ll go back to their hiding holes. The establishment media will keep pushing the anti-Israel narrative. That long predates October 7, and it will long outlast the war. But the establishment media doesn’t speak to the protester demographic. And their all-consuming obsession with Donald Trump ensures that they’ll move on to fresh apocalyptic terrain in no time. In her Times piece, Zonszein wrote, “Israel is not a victor, but a perpetual fighter.” But that’s more of a wish than a considered assessment of the facts. In reality, Israel is both a victor and a perpetual fighter. Its existence depends on it. Israel’s enemies are, by contrast, losers and cowards. Should the war end, they’ll slink off accordingly. Until, of course, the next time. Abe Greenwald is the editor-in-chief of Commentary. This essay was first published in the magazine's daily newsletter

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The Tyranny of Education Bureaucrats

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 05:05:36 +1100

Open classrooms, student-centred learning, outcome-based learning, positive behaviour learning — fashionable, yes, but they deliver only failure

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Shrink-Wrapped Butchery

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:10:07 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A [/fusion_dropcap]man in an English prison hospital is reported close to death. Such a wretched ending is a long way from the heights of the self-proclaimed president of an irredentist Balkan statelet who led his forces in a terrible war that left as many as 200,000 dead and displaced a million others. This is Dr Radovan Karadzic, the psychiatrist found guilty of genocide in the Bosnian War 1992-1995 and one of the most recent in the long line of medicos who have killed without conscience or regret. Karadzic was a practising psychiatrist who most notably directed the siege of Sarjevo, his own home town. his life and crimes are a case study in the debauching of professional ethics in the service of the state. Born in 1945 in the mountain village of Petnjica, Montenegro, his father, Vuk, was a vagrant with a criminal record of incest and theft. During World War II he joined the Chetniks, Serb partisans who fought against both Nazi occupiers and Tito’s communists. He was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted and he was jailed until Karadzic was eleven. Many of the Karadzic extended family were killed by Ustashe, the Croatian partisans, a legacy that must have left its mark. At 15, Karadzic moved to Sarajevo, mixing comfortably with Serbian, Croat and Muslim neighbours. He seems to have been popular; neighbours gave him free haircuts, baklava and shoe repairs. His striking looks – he was 1.8m tall with a Byronic shock of hair – attracted attention, and he became a serial seducer of women. He studied medicine at the University of Sarajevo, receiving his degree in 1971 and going on to qualify in psychiatry. He joined and left the Communist Party, and married Ljiljana Zelen, a psychiatrist from an upper-class Sarajevo family. The son of a miscreant peasant was well on the path to upward social mobility. From his student days, Karadzic wrote children’s stories and Serbian folk songs and published volumes of poetry conjuring images of violence, such as the charmingly titled Let’s Go Down to the Town and Kill Some Scum (1971). A prophetic poem, Sarajevo, described the city burning in a ‘blood-soaked tide’, while another, The Morning Hand-Grenade, left no doubt about his obsession with violence. As a psychiatrist he worked at Kosovo Hospital in Sarajevo. He studied neurotic disorders and depression in Denmark and had Tavistock Group Therapy training. In the mid-Seventies Karadzic (left) also studied at Columbia University, although there is no formal record of his enrollment, the rumour being that he was an agent of the former Yugoslavia's counterintelligence agency. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Kosovo hospital director later spoke of Karadzic refusal to accept that any failure was due to lack of ability, instead casting himself a victim of bias due his peasant origins. Another example of Karadzic’s boundless confidence in his own ability: despite lacking sporting experience he sought and won appointment as house psychiatrist with the Sarajevo and the Belgrade Red Star soccer teams, whose players he subjected to hypnosis. That, too, was the fault of others when they failed to win. With a taste for scotch and casinos, he sought extra income, often selling medical certificates to those who wanted state pensions. In 1985 he was sentenced to three years in prison for using a fraudulent $100,000 grant to build a chicken farm near Sarajevo. Claiming he was a political prisoner, Karadzic contacts made sure he served just 11 months before returning to work at the hospital. In 1989 Karadzic became head of the Serbian Green Party, a grim irony in view of his later despoiling large tracts of Bosnia. The next year he unexpectedly emerged as head of the Serbian Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina (known as the SDS). His aggressive nationalism and vicious anti-Muslim rhetoric surprised many who had regarded him as unscrupulous but apolitical until then.

We warned what would happen in the event of demands for an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina: Northern Ireland would be like a holiday camp compared to Bosnia.-- Karadzic

In 1990 the SDS proclaimed a network of ‘Serb Autonomous Regions’, orchestrating the removal of all Muslims and Croats from Serbs’ territories. As Yugoslavia moved toward dissolution in the following year, Karadzic warned that Bosnian Serbs would seek union with Serbia if Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence. Karadzic became president of the Republika Srpska in 1992 and the horrendous war his poetry had foreshadowed soon followed. By December 1992, Serbs had seized approximately 70% of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Karadzic authorised the siege of Sarajevo, shelling the homes of his colleagues and killing patients in their beds at the hospital where he had worked. After the Dayton Peace Accord in December 1995, the political tide turned and an international warrant for Karadzic's arrest was issued. At first, surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards, he ensconced himself in a remote mountain fastness in Eastern Bosnia, swearing he would never stand trial. This defiance was not to last. After the fall of Milosevic, Karadzic went on the run, hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, transformed with the teasingly alliterative title of Dr Dragan David Dabiç and promoting a weird theory of bioenergetics. His familiar jut-jawed face obscured by a dense beard, hair bound in a pony tail, looking like nothing less than an aging hippy, he ran group meetings and spoke regularly on a local radio station. His arrest in Belgrade in July 2008, proved, if nothing else, that the Balkan tradition of extremism, grandiosity and absurd gestures still thrived. Serbian authorities could have picked him up years earlier but it required a change of government committed to joining the EU before he was hooked off a suburban bus. He and his brutal general, Ratko Mladic, the mass murderer of Srbrenica, were shunted off to The Hague. Karadzic was charged with crimes against humanity and genocide, the first doctor so indicted since the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial in 1946. Karadzic commenced with the predictable set-piece that he did not recognise the jurisdiction of the court, was a victim of an international conspiracy and, in any event, had been promised an exemption from prosecution by the Americans. The court simply ignored his protests and after a series of fruitless appeals he was sentenced to 40 years, ending up in a cell in Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hat effect did his training in medicine and psychiatry have on his genocidal practices? Noting his grandiose view of himself, it is likely he saw medicine as a way to demonstrate his superiority. As a psychiatrist, Karadzic’s work was ‘ordinary’. Patients complained that he was not interested in their problems while colleagues said that he provoked psychotic patients. The ease with which he took to selling fake medical certificates and prescriptions indicates a contempt for professional standards and lack of scruples in attaining his goals. His drinking, womanising, gambling and indiscriminate spending indicate a recklessness infused with opportunism. Karadzic’s trajectory from hospital psychiatrist to genocidal murder shows an uncanny resonance with that of Hitler. Both came from a rural backgrounds to spend their early youth in multi-ethnic cosmopolitan surroundings – Hitler in Vienna, Karadzic in Sarajevo – over-compensating for their marginal origins by adopting a super-nationalistic postures. In Vienna Hitler mixed with people of all backgrounds including Jews, his murderous racism only coming to the fore in 1919. In Sarajevo, Karadzic socialised with Muslims, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Croats and Jews. He even sent birthday greetings to a Muslim colleague’s mother in 1990 when already promoting the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Serbia. Hitler, who failed to get into art or architecture school, regarded himself as an artist. While able to qualify as a psychiatrist, Karadzic's sense of blameless, frustrated ambition was cut from similar cloth. Colleague Marko Vesovic described him as a psychopath, ‘a man without a core’, while another said, “he doesn’t live in reality”^.Warren Zimmerman, the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, regarded him as barking mad, obsessed with violence and in need of psychiatric treatment. What cannot be denied is Karadzic’s capacity for gross denial, his “mechanism for the falsification of reality” as his most distinctive quality. His response to the killing of 68 civilians by a mortar shell at the Markale marketplace is characteristic. Contrary to all evidence, he insisted the corpses had been taken from the Sarajevo morgue – indicated, he swore, by the presence of ice in their ears – and blown up by Muslims to gain the sympathy of the world press. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]K[/fusion_dropcap]aradzic joins the perhaps surprisingly long list of doctors who turn their medical skills and ethics to serving the state and genocide. Doctors murder more than any other professional group, the assumption being that the power over life or death attracts them to the field in the first place. Dr Jean-Paul Marat, the bloodthirsty intellectual behind the French revolution's terror, was nothing less than a serial killer who murderered with a quill and signature. The Armenian genocide was carried out at the behest of the Itihadist Central Committee, dominated by doctors. Dr Mehmed Resid referred to Armenians as ‘dangerous microbes,’ whom it was the duty of all doctors to destroy. This set the tone for the Nazi Holocaust, which commenced with psychiatrists killing their own patients as ‘life unfit for life’ and proceeded to the industrial death camps, where medicine reached its lowest-ever point, as recorded in the transcripts of the Nuremburg Doctors Trials. Think also of Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, a tropical medicine specialist, Dr Hastings Banda of Malawi, and Dr Ernesto Che Guevara (above). More recently, we have seen the prominent role of doctors, notably paediatricians and cardiologists, in murderous terrorist and state organisations. Such noteworthies include paediatrician Dr George Habash, head of the PLF, and surgeon (with training in psychology) Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man. In Eastern Europe, China and Cuba, dissidents and perceived enemies of the state were subjected to abusive “treatment” in state psychiatric hospitals. In South America, doctors assisted repressive dictatorial regimes. In apartheid South Africa, ‘Doctor Death’ Wouter Basson investigated poisoning black townships' water supplies and using chemicals to paralyse terrorists. Another South African, psychiatrist Aubrey Levin, carried out a program of electric shocks to ‘cure’ homosexual conscripts. The incarcerated Karadzic no doubt consoles himself in his dying days with the thought that he will be remembered as a nationalist martyr. To some hardline Serbian nationalists, perhaps that is so. For the rest of us, he will be yet another doctor who wantonly and in good conscieencedebauched the most fundamental ethic of his profession, which is to save life. Robert M Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist who writes about doctors who abuse human rights on behalf of the state. He has written a number of articles and two chapters on Dr Karadzic

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GKP S7/E12 – The Charlie Kirk Assassination

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 18:23:11 +1100

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-imwja-198a88c G’day Folks, In this episode of the General Knowledge Podcast, Lee and Andy finally reconnect after months apart, kicking things off with some light banter and tech troubles before diving into catch-up mode. Lee shares stories from his recent family trip to Thailand, reflecting on how quickly life passes and the importance of taking […]

Vale Tom Borody, a Voice of True Science

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:19:40 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he world has lost a courageous seeker of truth. I had been aware for some time that my friend and colleague Thomas Borody was seriously ill suffering from Guillaine-Barre syndrome. A post on X last night alerted me to his passing. Tom, 75, first became aware of me as a person with expertise in drug regulatory affairs following my publications in Quadrant, the only publication at the time which permitted any public questioning of pandemic policy, COVID-19 management and the potential use of ivermectin in the pandemic. Both Prof. Robert Clancy and myself took advantage of this publication to try and alert the public to the disinformation and misinformation which was being promulgated by the Australian and other governments, politicians and so-called “medical experts”. These initial papers were followed by publication in other fearless journals including Spectator Australia, Brownstone Institute and Trial Site News. (see below) Despite ill-informed and widespread criticism from his colleagues and the medical profession as a whole, Tom frequently appeared on TV media interviews trying to get the message out about his first-hand experience regarding the usefulness of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19. Tom began to gather around him a group of advisors which included Robert Clancy and myself to try and gain approval for the use of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19 at a time when the official government advice was 'if you get COVID-19, do nothing, go home, isolate and if you got really sick get admitted to hospital'. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he government claimed there was no treatment available. Tom disagreed. And as we all now know, he was right. I got to know Tom fairly well. In many ways, we were opposites. He was highly intuitive, brave, impulsive and enjoyed thinking out of accepted paradigms -- that was his rare strength. As a gastroenterologist, his credentials were impeccable: MD, PhD and DSc and he headed the biggest gastro clinic in Australia, located at Fivedock in Sydney. Many believe he should have shared a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in uncovering the cause of gastric ulcer along with Dr. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren, and in developing triple antibiotic therapy for the underlying I tried many times to call Tom to introduce myself as I knew I could assist him in his attempts to gain approval and use of the novel combination ivermectin, zinc and doxycycline in the management of Covid-19. I could not get past his personal assistant, but through another contact involved with the Australian Medical Professional Association who knew both Tom and myself, one day out of the blue I got a phone call from the famous Professor Thomas Borody. We hit it off immediately and he asked if I would be prepared to advise him on how to deal with the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) to gain regulatory approval for his ivermectin triple therapy. Of course, I jumped at the chance. How could I resist? It was both highly rewarding and frustrating working with Tom. In my usual way, I would analyse scientific issues in great detail and present lengthy reports and advice to Tom on regulatory strategy but I got the impression no matter what I said, he knew where he wanted to go. My job was to make it happen. I worked for Tom for many, many months pro bono as I knew he could save lives. I advised and assisted Tom and the rest of his team on the compilation of a TGA submission for his chosen ivermectin triple therapy and even went so far as having a pre-submission meeting with senior TGA staff including Assoc. Prof. John Skerritt, head of the TGA at the time. I knew it was going to be a daunting job to get the TGA to approve ivermectin for COVID-19. The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) declared ivermectin a toxic horse medicine despite its widespread use for many years for the treatment of parasites and having beeen declared an "essential medicine" by the World Health Organisation (WHO) with its discoverers being awarded the Nobel Prize. “Medical experts” in Australia followed suit and demonised anyone suggesting the usefulness of ivermectin. Doctors were suspended from practice from prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19, medical licences were taken away and in Queensland it was actually a criminal offense attracting jail time for prescribing ivermectin. But this did not thwart Tom from proceeding. Having worked with the TGA over several decades representing more than half of the international pharmaceutical companies in Australia and gaining the approval of many new drugs, I knew that the TGA had highly competent staff capable of diligently assessing scientific and clinical data provided to it and reaching supportable and justifiable conclusions. But the TGA I once knew was no longer. It became more and more apparent to me as time went on that the TGA was not going to be helpful in this case and it was going to be an uphill battle to get any ivermectin therapeutic approved despite any safety and efficacy evidence. Tom tried his best to save lives. He gave it everything he had. That was the nature of the man. He was a fighter. I am proud to have been able to work with such a talented scientist/clinician. He will be missed by many. Farewell my friend. Altman, P.: The Who, How and Why of COVID-19. Quadrant Magazine, 25 July 2021. https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/07/the-who-how-and-why-of-covid-19-and-its-treatment/ Altman, P.: A Total Lack of Therapeutic Perspective. Quadrant Online. 22 Aug. 2021. https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2021/08/a-total-lack-of-therapeutic-perspective/ Altman, P.: Ivermectin: Chemists Place Themselves Between Doctor and Patient. Quadrant Online. 31 Aug. 2021. https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2021/08/ivermectin-chemists-place-themselves-between-doctor-and-patient/ Altman, P.: Covid confusion: reckless and illogical governments. The Spectator Australia, 6 Dec. 2022. https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/12/covid-confusion-reckless-and-illogical-governments/ Altman, P. et al: did National Security Imperatives Compromise COVID-19 Vaccine Safety? Trial Site News (Trialsitenews.com) – Dec. 19 2022. https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/did-national-security-imperatives-compromise-covid-19-vaccine-safety-adfea242 Altman, P. et al: did National Security Imperatives Compromise COVID-19 Vaccine Safety? Brownstone Institute – Jan. 5 2023. https://brownstone.org/articles/did-national-security-imperatives-compromise-covid-19-vaccine-safety/

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The Unequal, Inevitable Result

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 06:16:49 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]hose of Bruce Pascoe’s ilk, or for that matter our often well-meaning governments, perceive great things in Aboriginal culture, past, present and 'emerging'. If the proponents of all things indigenous are to be believed, Aboriginal culture can teach the world many things, even about mathematics, cosmology, ecological management, child raising, democracy, and social harmony. Pascoe claims to believe tribal Aborigines settled in towns, raised crops and pursued animal husbandry long before these practices were common in Europe. The reason why these claims are implausible is a matter not only of all too often misquoted and misrepresented historical sources but of culture. Indigenous culture, frozen in its Dream Time, lacked the systems needed to organise, to build more complex associations, and to apply, accumulate and transmit knowledge over time. Despite what the best-selling fauxborigine fabulist would have you believe, it also lacked access to the types of grains and animals which could be systematically domesticated and harvested. That being said, there is no overstating how superbly adapted the Aboriginal people were to surviving Australia's hostile environments, a challenge colonial newcomers at first struggled to meet. There are numerous stories of how lost explorers and escaped convicts benefited from Aboriginal help and would have perished without it. Aborigines knew the land and followed its patterns. They made the most of the resources available to them. However their unchanging, static culture, isolated from new ideas and systems, left them vulnerable. When Europeans arrived, Aborigines struggled at first to adapt, to adopt new ways and new thinking, and were in many ways flat-footed by the pace and magnitude of change. Native survivalism came into direct confrontation with colonial Europe with the arrival of the First Fleet. Colonial Europe, by contrast, had benefited from cultural systems of thought built up over thousands of years and by the ongoing competition of ideas. This mosaic of technology, knowledge, aspiration and culture grew with each generation. It was never as simple as the white man having muskets. It was that the newly formed colony could organise at scale in a remote and hostile environment. Distant supplies could be ordered, a disciplined militia formed and justice administered, keeping man’s worst impulses if not at bay at least subject to the rule of law. Maps could be drawn and land allocated in systematic fashion, food preserved, work organised according to the goals and needs of the colony -- the list expands forever. All these systems hung on a framework of writing, formalised learning, transmitted knowledge and hierarchical administrative order, all concepts alien to indigenous culture. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]t the core of Western exceptionalism is the love of literature and of writing. While certainly true that many of the convicts were unlearned and illiterate, the same cannot be said of the colony’s leaders. Governor Philip and successors received instructions and news from half a world away and, in turn, sent detailed reports and requests back to England. Within the early colony, even within convict ranks, European skills and technologies developed over centuries were applied. Agriculture, , smithing, exploitation of forest timber, animal husbandry, tanning, medicine, masonry and quarrying. These skills were honed by specialist apprenticeships, techniques spawned by methodical experimentationn and modern tooling. Certainly the command of metallurgy was a key enabler, but these tools, while of vital practical importance, were the fruits of an accumulated body of learning applied by a determined, literate and organised civilisation. And there was the blessing of capitalism. Whilst the first arrivals relied upon colonial supply, exploited prison labour, and payment in rum, new industries quickly formed on a for-profit basis that was accelerated by the arrival of non-convict settlers. Squatters and those formally allocated land quickly built wool production and the colony transitioned as a reesult from a net sink of England’s supplies to a producer and trader in its own right. Contrast this early economy with the redistributive nature of indigenous culture, whose legacy is apparent even today. A scarce resource is not to be husbanded solely for productive purposes in native culture. Under capitalism, the most efficient and productive claim the greatest rewards and a cycle of reinvestment ensues. Eventually everyone benefits through a grown economy. Instead, in tribal culture, all windfalls must be parcelled out to even the most unproductive, with little or no thought to tomorrow. It is astonishing to think that in less than 50 years after several small penal settlements were established, vast tracts of land were explored, settled, and made productive far and beyond what could be eked out through the methods and societal traditions hunter-gatherer subsistence. While activists flaunt their black armbands and propagate myths of diseased blankets and poison flour, the truth is that the Aboriginal population was quite simply out-produced, out-organised and out-thought. This is not a judgement on the relative rights or wrongs of colonisation, but offered as an antidote to the propaganda which misrepresents Aboriginal culture, a la Pascoe, as far beyond its actual capabilities. Likewise, Western exceptionalism is downplayed and denigrated in order to, as it were, "even the playing field" by means of misrepresentation. The rapid achievements of the early settlers were, quite frankly, awe inspiring. At no stage were Aborigines actively locked out as a separate people; rather they were invited to learn and to prosper alongside the rough men of Europe. It is something to which all Australians should celebrate and respect. Lennard Caldwell, an electrical engineer, lives in Victoria

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The Bifurcation of the World

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 06:00:12 +1100

Does America really have all the cards, as Trump insists? The fact is that even the strongest hand is only as good as the player

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The Argus: Life and Death of a Newspaper

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:43:00 +1100

here was a joke among Melbourne journalists in the 1950s that whenever reporters from the city’s morning papers were ushered into Government House (for a rare reception or press conference), an aide would introduce them in order of rank: “Your Excellency, may I present the gentleman from the Age, the man from the Argus and the bloke from the Sun.” Paul Ormonde used to tell that story (he may have invented it), and it had a special piquancy for those who remembered the Argus in earlier days as the leading voice of Melbourne’s conservative establishment. The Argus was once a […]

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Middle of the Road is no Place to Stand

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 07:15:39 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he energy-without-form that is the general mood is like a boulder tied fast with many ropes against a sheer slope. The ropes strain and stretch; with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one of them was severed by a bloody sword. If you ever wondered if the crowd today would release Barabbas over Christ – George Floyd over Charlie Kirk – you have your answer. This is palpable anywhere in the Anglosphere, despite, as many Australians lament, our ongoing Americanisation in the age of Trump, as though the nature of progressive politics is anything but the most wretched American export. Lunatics exist, and lunatics with means and motive are features of history. The horror is not only the bullet ripping through an innocent man’s throat, but the reaction of millions of people who are your neighbours, coworkers, family members, classmates. Like everything in our age of omnipresent entertainment and hall-of-mirrors, events surrounding the event itself took on a sense of perverse theatre. So much of contemporary life is pseudo-participatory and performative, to the point where people become unknown even to themselves; but sometimes, in spite of this, people unknown to themselves make themselves known to everybody else. This was evil showing itself to the world, and many millions of people deciding that they would participate in that evil, in whatever way they could. Most shocking was the vast number of young women – unworldly, physically weak, the type largely insulated from violence – taking great pleasure in the murder. They are Orwell’s most bigoted adherents, the amateur spies and swallowers of slogans. Too many of the gentle sex have been rendered psychopathic by decades of social engineering, by narratives of power-without-responsibility. What future is there, as the Cheyenne Indians said, when the hearts of your women are in the ground? The monster was briefly in plain sight, and has more acolytes than we thought. These acolytes frothed the murder of a mild-mannered man in a seething frenzy of bloodlust and found it funny. And they weren’t just the terminally-online types, those you would expect. They were professionals, middle-class teachers, nurses, managers, university lecturers, the educated classes. It is one thing to watch clips of hoodlums looting Foot Locker – the bottom quintile will always be with us – versus your child’s mild-mannered preschool teacher gloating on TikTok. Those most pleased by Charlie’s death are the intelligentsia, the cognitive engine room of our knowledge-based economies, the type who make decisions that affect you. It was an ill-thought-out moment of enormous moral and cultural overreach, one that was frightening because it was spontaneous. Those who filmed themselves gloating assumed a receptive audience. Their ghoulish reactions went beyond bad taste, in character like the disinterring of nuns by revolutionary Communists during the Spanish Civil War. In a sudden moment of clarity across the Anglosphere, it was obvious that we had nothing in common with these people, often our kinsmen, any longer. They have become vessels for evil, and call it good. They think violence against real or imagined Nazis – a term denuded of any proper meaning – the highest moral calling. Those who disagree with their retarded views qualify and are fair game. And Charlie Kirk was not a nazi. His was your dad’s constitutional conservatism. His was the conservatism of ordinary people who want equanimity and the 1990s back. It was the artefact of a homogenous and consensus-driven zeitgeist that no longer exists; one he hoped he could help restore. This was an honourable pursuit. He was a political figure, but he was not a politician; in that sense, he was a non-combatant. He was the gentlest of the moderate Zoomer Right, something many are only realising posthumously. The message is this: we want you dead, and we will laugh when it happens. He was decent, good-natured, kind. If they celebrate his death, they’ll celebrate your death. Those with harder views thought Charlie Kirk naive and questionably funded. Yet in the hours following his death, all manner of figures on the Right closed around him in heartfelt eulogy, whether inside or outside the Conservative Inc. tent. His most recalcitrant critics on X, convicted in their spirit, exclaimed that Charlie was a better man than they; as one otherwise agnostic account put it, ‘if you feel grieved, it is because you are part of the body of Christ.’ Many of the grieved had never given Charlie much thought before; many more from further on the Right considered him an ideological rival. There followed moments of introspection and soul-searching as many discovered that questions of acceleration are less important than questions of direction. Bitter antagonists like Nick Fuentes found themselves overcome by grief and fellow-feeling. “Who will help me carry him?” It brought to mind when Caesar received word that Pompey had been killed in Egypt. Caesar, who had fought Pompey across Italy and Greece, wept for his erstwhile rival’s ignoble end, and called it a “great deed of abomination.” [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap] great deed of abomination indeed: only those with hearts blacker than Tolkien’s imagining could praise the livestreamed assassination of a man in front of his wife and children. It was more than “if it can happen to him, it can happen to me.” People were shaken from grift or point-scoring games for algorithmic engagement, what so much political discourse among right wing influencers has felt like for years. Farming edgelord points so large accounts will retweet you suddenly seemed childish; is childish. The death of Charlie Kirk is potentially the death of conservative reasonableness in the United States, and what starts in the United States inevitably ends up in the rest of the West, as true in the age of Instagram as it was in the age of Ford. Trend follows power. Australian institutions may produce Biden-era talking points – look to some media commentary – but they risk wearing seventies garb in the age of grunge. They are tinny and seem out-of-step. We look to our older cousin and shake our heads: gun violence, inner-city crime, bombastic politics. In the same moment, we take our cues. Ordinary people, who previously rejected the tenets of those further right than Charlie Kirk, will reexamine their positions. Many moderates heeded calls for unity in the past. But who would want unity with their opposites now? They may accept the terms thrown down by ideological enemies who cheer their deaths. If there is unity, it will be unity on the Right, who spend so much time fighting one another. There will be a hardening, a squeeze on the natural tendency of the moderate Right to live and let live. The old mantra coined by Charles Krauthammer – that conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are evil – will no longer hold. Stupidity is reformable, requires education and convincing to rectify, the mantra of Charlie Kirk himself. Stupidity is necessary but no longer sufficient an explanation. There may be a retraction of the long-held reticence to use state power to denude, defund, and ultimately destroy internal enemies, a reticence that has origins in Locke’s notion of toleration. Many have instead concluded Tolstoy was right: the wicked become worse when they are tolerated. They did not respond with riots or the burning of cities, because civilisation demands restraint. The energy turned inwards; vigils, memorials. But there was an iciness to it – willing to wait until every count should be proved. Voice even and low; eyes level and straight, with neither sign nor show. It was not suddenly bred; it will not swiftly abate, through the chilled years ahead. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]his is bad news for oblivious Leftists who have been treated as a client group by institutional power for a long time, who like to larp as oppressed anti-fascists. Given their physiognomy, they are the very last people who should be calling for extrajudicial violence. These are not the Red steelworkers of an earlier age. Already they are finding the tools they were so quick to use in the prior decade turned against them: many have lost their jobs or been otherwise made persona non grata by a furious backlash. They are, for the first time, realising what it is like to lose the cultural battle. As one sharp commentor noted, reprisal has struck them like smallpox an isolated tribe. Despite all their histrionic wailing – simultaneously tactic and delusion – they’ve been on the winning side since 1968, and behave always with impunity. The complete incongruence that met Jimmy Kimmel’s brief termination demonstrated total ignorance of the means and methods their own foot soldiers, in cahoots with frightened or unprincipled institutions, have used for a decade now. Suddenly the Left imagines itself the faction of free speech. It would be comical were it less sinister. They are learning the hard way why Sir Thomas More, in the play A Man For All Seasons, remarked to his son-in-law William Roper that he’d give the Devil the benefit of law, for his own safety’s sake. The term stochastic terrorism, that they were so happy to indulge, has been leveraged against them. As Alexander Hamilton said, when the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn put it best:

The most terrifying force of death, comes from the hands of men who wanted to be left alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over.

Thus the real reckoning is for the moderate Right. The podcasterati arm have to decide how they will navigate a world where the college kids they own in epic debates about foetuses and free speech and crime statistics celebrate their murder. Organisations like Turning Point USA and the Leadership Institute – fulcrums of the normie Right in America – will need to consider questions not only of security but of strategy. Many moderate followers of Charlie Kirk will assume only a lack of courage or opportunity restrains the other side. They will be looking to shed the cloak and buy a sword. To the establishment arms of the Right across the Anglosphere and outside America, whose charges rightly expect that these problems are not limited to today’s Rome, the electoral response of that heaving boulder will be this: do something, or get out of the way. The hostile ideas and doctrines of the age did not emerge naturally, nor in a vacuum. When you have held political power, you have thrown your hands up and in the name of vague universalist principles allowed existential enemies a seat at the table. The universities, the broadcasters, and the intelligentsia at large have been permitted to ferment the noxious fumes that now suffocate our public life. If politics-as-usual by the Centre Right remains unwilling to resist the dispossession of our people and destruction of our civilisation, then they will need to clear the way for people who will. Many no longer acknowledge them as the legitimate bearers of our political destiny. They are viewed as having meandered, clung to tired orthodoxies now redundant, and been gradually 1984ed into irrelevance. The old alliance between economic liberals and social libertarians is not capable of meeting the challenges of the hour. There is a need for truth in our political discourse. There is a desire for obvious evils, like anti-white racial theory, transgenderism, and Gramscianism, to be named and fought. We do not want foreign influence in our politics; we do not want you to take money from business and strangle the working man; instead we want you to be the principled leaders that our people deserve as heirs of the greatest civilisation that has ever existed; we want you to win our respect. And when you win, we want the institutions cleared out from top to bottom; we want traitorous liberals and leftists, who have brought us to this point and corrupted the minds of the young, banished from public life. If you do not have the stomach for what is coming, then take your swords and fall on them.

The post Middle of the Road is no Place to Stand first appeared on Quadrant.

New Agitprop, now with Added Woke!

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 06:11:59 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]s ‘racist’ the most overused, and abused, word in the political lexicon of the Left? Judging by the recent antics of Adelaide street artist Peter Drew it most certainly is. When he uses that word, and he uses it a lot, Mr Drew (master’s degree from the Glasgow School of Art who specialises in the art form of posters) perfectly typifies Ann Coulter’s wicked bon mot that “the modern definition of ‘racist’ is anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal”. The same goes for flinging ‘white nationalist’ and ‘white supremacist’ when a mere 'racist' hasn’t worked. The word ‘racist’ is most often used concerning anyone who dissents from the mass-immigration narrative or the Diversity/Inclusion/Equity imperative, but more broadly covers all whom the Left doesn’t like for any reason (‘fascist’ also serves the same purpose). Mr Drew saw the recent March For Australia rally in Adelaide, which police estimated at 15,000 (so the real number can safely be doubled), and he observed many people he didn’t like. Not at all. Sorely aggrieved he flew into action at the sight of so many Australian flags signifying a loud 'No!', Voice-referendum-style, to the elite’s official message that diversity is our greatest strength. So he took to Adelaide’s public walls along North Terrace, part of the marchers’ route, and slapped up posters depicting some of Australia’s earliest non-Anglo migrants. Nobody denies their place in the country's history, nor that their descendants were thoroughly and wholly Australian, as Keith Windschuttle demonstrated in his magisterial March 2006 Quadrant essay, 'Why Australia is not a racist country'. But today, how less enriched would Australia be without the imported ancient hatreds of new arrivals? Beg to differ and you must, by definition, be a racist, especially if you compound your thought crime by noting one religion in particular contributes more than its share of racists, misogynists, homophobes and advocates of female genital mutilation, not to mention the home-invading human capital from the world's plughole countries. Surprisingly, the machete-wielding element does not figure among Mr Drew’s poster boys and gals. Many Australians, however, have both noticed and recoiled from the rampant diversity for which they did not vote, and thus did the March For Australia participants turn out in what must be close to record numbers. But they didn’t count on bold Mr Drew, who fancies himself and his posters single-handedly putting mobs of racist Australians in their place. Mr Drew fancies himself as not just courageous but as an Antipodean Banksy. The difference is that, unlike the UK graffitist, our Mr Drew is not at all shy about hiding his identity. When you have virtue to spare why not show it off? One of his earlier poster projects involved pictures of his shirtless self assuming various poses intended to display the physical magnificence off a ripped-and-buffed gym rat. Quite appropriately, he called the series The Narcissist: a self-portrait (below). That overt narcissism, one imagines, also was manifested in his desire to advertise what a Good Person he is compared to Filthy Racists. So he decided to confront the marchers with his posters, which he put up, performance-art-style, during the march. Most marchers merely rolled their eyes at yet another leftoid demanding attention, but a handful tore down the posters. Well, this gave the media and Mr. Drew an opening to further besmirch the marchers as advocates of violence and stiflers of free speech. “Angry anti-migration mob rips down Adelaide art”, reported InDaily, Adelaide’s free online news site, which is loaded with real estate ads, so one might assume the commercial opportunities presented by mass immigration butters more than few parsnips in the organ's sales department. Mr Drew had to be “moved on by police for his own safety”, it was reported, because violence is precisely what you expect from homegrown bigots, unlike our latest mass shipments of (clears throat) new-style New Australians. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]M[/fusion_dropcap]r Drew has been ‘fighting racism’, media reports informed us, with his posters -- the artist himself estimates as many as four thousand of them -- which began appearing in response to “Islamophobic street marches”. When the March for Australia was announced he just couldn’t resist the temptation to “put it in their faces”. “I’ve been rewarded with attention, accolades and praise,” he crowed. enduring all the attention while vowing to draw energy from the minor kerfuffle in Adelaide and put up “a thousand new artworks across Australia”. Mr Drew truly matches the energy and output of Alexei Stakhanov. The legacy media will no doubt continue to applaud Mr Drew – after all, its hacks called the March For Australia “controversial” because, whilst the protest was ostensibly against what the protestors “claimed” was mass migration, the media really know that it was but a gigantic dog-whistle to the dark Id of Australian racism and bigotry. They also also call Mr Drew’s art “subversive” and “challenging” despite it being fully in tune with the prevailing diversity ideology, as seen in everything from TV advertisements to corporate hiring policies. The media also hunted up diversity-sympathetic voices such as the SA head of the government’s Australia Day Council, who said the first march and others that are planned to follow would cause “sadness among the state’s migrant and refugee communities”. Needless to say, the one-sided media barely quoted anyone from the protests. Please don't get the impression Adelaide's brave artist/rebel is content merely to crudely slander the marchers as foul racists. No, he strives for the enlightenment of the poor souls – “my posters aim to confront the Australian people’s collective lack of self awareness”, he solemnly announces, adding that “these people need to see what they look like and how negative their perspective is”. Mr Drew, you see, “loves Australia as it is, not as they [the marchers] wish it to be”. He is also a fount of profound insight which, of course, the hacks taking down his quotes never questioned. For instance: “Migrants understand Australia and its history better than someone who was born here”, those of us who disapprove of ethnic ghettoes, ethnic gangs, ethnic separatism and ethnic all-the-rest are “lost and in need of help”. Mr. Drew’s unsolicited concern for the spiritual welfare of so many benighted fellow countrymen is touching. Would court-ordered spells in a state mental institution suffice? He has had “countless confrontations with people on the street” whilst out and about on his civilising mission to darkest, racist Australia. His challengers, he notes, are usually older men (a very problematic demographic!) and "often angry”. They are full of “insecurities”, which is to be expected of men beset by "personal inadequacies hidden beneath the veil of their political convictions”. Thanks for the psychology lesson, Mr Drew, but,speaking as an older Australian male, I know where and why so many of us stand in seeking to get immigration under control if we are to preserve what is unique and, yes, positive, about the Anglo-Celtic foundations of the Australian nation. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]gitprop is a portmanteau word originating in the Soviet Union and used to describe the efforts of the Commissariat for Agitation and Propaganda. Their modern heirs are still with us and now come in woke flavours, with Mr Drew is one of its leading cadre delivering propaganda through activist art. Despite protestations he cares little for politics, our Mr Drew is clearly of the Left. Socialist Alternative, for example, dismisses any possibility that those attending the March for Australia have legitimate concerns. Socialist Alliance (the home of Green Left Weekly) calls for organising counter-demonstrations with “workers’ defence guards” to “smash the white supremacists”. Not to be left out, the Australian Communist Party takes us on a nostalgia tour of 1930s Stalinist invective by referring to the marchers as “weak-gutted maggots” (and the Left wonders why the working class doesn’t listen to them any more). All this is yet another taste of how the Left approaches the immigration debate – denounce opponents as ugly racists, chase them off the streets, expel them from YouTube, cancel them with misinformation laws, get in their faces with provocative posters and void them by any means necessary. Calling everyone you don’t like a ‘racist’ is the AK-47 in the Left’s arsenal -- cheap, crude and inaccurate but easily used by even its dimmest acolytes, a category which appears to include at least one foot-soldier taking to the field with a look-at-me six-pack and posing pouch.

The post New Agitprop, now with Added Woke! first appeared on Quadrant.

Child Soldiers and Islamic Schools

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:44:28 +1100

Muslim children in Australia and other Western countries are being indoctrinated with much the same ideology that gave birth to ISIS and Al Qaeda

The post Child Soldiers and Islamic Schools first appeared on Quadrant.

Nationalist Illusions

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:31:02 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he inauguration of Donald Trump as 45th President of the United States brought forth a spate of Australian commentary deploring his views as “nationalist”. Former Labor foreign minister and New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr, said the election of “a loudmouth nationalist” to the White House meant Australia should reappraise its international alliances and adopt a new foreign policy stance: “More Asia. Less US.” The Greens declared themselves appalled at Trump’s election and “the politics of racism, misogyny and nationalism that Donald Trump represents”. Left-wing Perth academic Johan Lidberg summed up in New Matilda, saying Trump’s inauguration was symptomatic of a malaise sweeping the planet, not only in the US and post-Brexit UK but also in France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Austria, Poland, Hungary and, of course, Australia via Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. “The common denominators,” Lidberg wrote, “are nationalism and xenophobia. Has the mix of strong nationalism and fear of the other ever brought the world anything but conflict? The answer is no.” The use of “nationalist” as a pejorative term is nothing new. I have written in these pages often enough that left-wing academics have long misused the notion that Australian history has harboured a deeply entrenched racist nationalism since the country was founded. During the so-called Cronulla Riots between Muslim and Anglo youths in 2005, the University of Melbourne feminist historian Marilyn Lake mocked the New South Wales Police Commissioner for saying those involved were un-Australian. “What is un-Australian about calling for racial exclusion in the name of the nation?” she asked. “Is not racial exclusion a deep part of our heritage, as traditional an Australian value as mateship?” Nonetheless, I was still surprised to see the New South Wales Chief Justice, Tom Bathurst, coming out in support of similar sentiments. Bathurst spoke on February 2 in the middle of the Trump furore and only a few days after two prominent voices, former Howard government minister Ian Macfarlane and former Labor Party president Warren Mundine, both made appeals in the press for Australia Day to be shifted from January 26, the anniversary of the First Fleet’s landing, to a date supposedly less offensive to the Aboriginal political class. Opening the new law term, Bathurst drew on another contentious issue in Australian history to demonstrate where he stood. Bathurst cited the “Afghan affair” of 1888 to demonstrate how “one of the most serious threats to the rule of law in Australia was grounded in xenophobia”. In a thinly veiled comparison with Donald Trump, Bathurst said the New South Wales Premier in 1888, Henry Parkes, used “inflammatory language that we are perhaps not unfamiliar with today”, in a racist bid to prevent Chinese passengers disembarking from a ship, the Afghan, in Sydney Harbour and to permanently bar all other Chinese from entry. As Bathurst tells the story, Parkes defied a Supreme Court decision that the detention of the Afghan’s passengers was illegal and instructed his police force not to allow them ashore. The Parkes government, Bathurst says, “maintained this defiance of the rule of law for a considerable period of time, leading Chief Justice Darley to admonish the government’s actions as unprecedented and in flagrant disregard of the law”. Eventually, the government conceded and allowed the detainees to land. According to Bathurst, the incident was a victory for the wiser heads of the legal profession against the baser instincts of populism. It “demonstrates the role of the judiciary and the profession in promoting equality, fairness and the rule of law, in spite of popular sentiment”.

From our April 2017 issue. Click here to subscribe

Bathurst’s account of these events clearly reflects his desire to make a political point, not just in favour of the rule of law as it was applied 129 years ago, but also against politicians in our own time who might appeal to “popular sentiment”, that is, who invoke populist prejudices against people of a different race. However, Bathurst’s account of the Afghan affair leaves a lot to be desired. Had he done a little more research into the newspaper reports and parliamentary debates of the day (all now available online on Trove), to assess the reasons why the incident became a cause célèbre at the time, he might have found that Henry Parkes was not quite the populist villain he imagines. The Afghan arrived in Australian waters in April 1888 with 268 Chinese passengers, half destined for New Zealand, the rest for Melbourne and Sydney. It first tried to land in Melbourne, where sixty passengers presented sets of naturalisation papers to verify their status as domiciled Victorians returning from overseas visits. Customs authorities found forty-eight of the papers were forgeries. Faced with a heavy fine if he landed illegal immigrants, the Afghan’s captain upped anchor and headed for Sydney. At the time, illegal immigration had become a major colonial scandal. Customs officers had recently unearthed a traffic in naturalisation papers, including one case of 600 sets of forged papers which gave Chinese illegal entry. This practice, it is worth noting, was not uniquely Australian but was a common phenomenon on the west coast of the United States too. At the same time, deputations to both the New South Wales and Victorian parliaments sought relief work for the growing number of unemployed in both colonies, and a reduction in immigration numbers. When news of the Afghan’s pending arrival reached Sydney, the labour movement, led by trade union newspaper editor John Norton, called a public protest meeting on May 3. A crowd of 5000 then marched to Parliament House in Macquarie Street demanding the Chinese not be allowed to land. Henry Parkes exploited the situation for his own political advantage, at least initially. When the ship reached Sydney on May 6, Parkes forbade any passengers to land, except some holding bona fide New South Wales naturalisation papers. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]ithin a week, three more ships, the Tsinan, the Guthrie and the Menmuir, steamed into Sydney Harbour carrying between them 531 Chinese passengers. Parkes also forbade them to land and, on May 16, introduced a new bill to the Legislative Assembly, increasing the Chinese entry tax from ten to one hundred pounds, reducing the number of Chinese immigrants permitted entry, and denying them future naturalisation. Given advice that some of these proposals were unlawful and would not be approved by the Colonial Office in London, Parkes rhetorically declared he would defy the Crown and sever the British connection. In the meantime, pro-Chinese lobbyists went to the New South Wales Supreme Court, where they argued that several of the passengers on the ships were Australian-resident Chinese who held valid exemption certificates and other papers. The Supreme Court agreed with the applicants. It held Parkes’s action was unlawful, those passengers still on the ships were illegally detained, and those with exemption certificates should be allowed to land. Rather than defy the law for “a considerable period of time”, Parkes quickly acceded to the court’s authority. On May 19, three days after pushing his bill through Parliament, he changed his mind so that forty-two passengers from the Afghan and eight from the Tsinan who held the proper documents could land. Other would-be immigrants who were prepared to pay the entrance tax disembarked soon after. Once he had overcome his initial rush of blood to the head, Parkes took a conciliatory position. He set up a three-man board, with Sydney’s influential Chinese merchant Quong Tart (atop this page) one of its members, to provide compensation to those Chinese passengers who had exhausted their funds or otherwise suffered through the events. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]n other words, rather than a major crisis in which racism threatened the rule of law in New South Wales, the Afghan affair revealed legitimate grievances on both sides. Lawful immigrants and Australian-domiciled Chinese held aboard ship were inconvenienced for a short time—less than two weeks—but eventually compensated for their trouble. And rather than an uprising of populist white racism, the underlying cause of the Chinese hardship was their own countrymen’s widespread practice of illegal immigration. In this, the Afghan affair of 1888 was almost a precise antecedent of the Tampa incident of August 2001 when the Howard government, faced with the rise of a formidable trade in people-smuggling, took dramatic action to shut down the business. John Howard was accused by many intellectuals, academics and lawyers of exploiting the racist fears of Australian rednecks to ensure his “dark victory” in the election of November that year. In reality, Howard’s only crime was to be sensitive to his electorate and to recognise that, in an egalitarian immigrant society like Australia, the people electors despise most are queue-jumpers. This is a distaste most keenly felt by recent immigrants who have abided by the proper rules for entry. Popular opinion is also patriotic and strongly endorses the principle that governments have a duty to preserve national borders. Neither of these sentiments threatens the proper rule of law—in fact, they would not exist without it. It is disappointing to see a Chief Justice succumbing to what is essentially a fictional left-wing historical trope more at home in the sleazy halls of our universities’ humanities departments than in our Supreme Courts.

The post Nationalist Illusions first appeared on Quadrant.

Not His Best Work Indeed

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 10:26:34 +1100

“Joe Biden and Hunter Biden have been accused of corruption, but there's good reason to be sceptical.”

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]hat was the headline on senior ABC reporter Matt Bevan’s take on Hunter Biden’s laptop, a story the ABC published on October 23, 2020, ten days before America’s November 3 election. Bevan’s investigation became the only, and therefore definitive, ABC inquiry into the laptop scandal during the next four years. His day job was the podcast ‘America, if you’re listening … Catch up on our full coverage of events in the US.” ABC chair Kim Williams often repeats that ABC-commissioned polling shows the ABC enjoys the trust of 79-80% of the Australian public. So how trustworthy is the ABC, based on its coverage of Hunter’s laptop? Not trustworthy at all, as the ABC now admits (free ABC log-in required to access the Hunter’s Laptop podcast). In what became the greatest censorship conspiracy of the 21^st century, America’s Deep State intelligence agencies lied to the legacy media and social media giants that the laptop story emerging pre-election from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post was "likely" Russian disinformation. The FBI in fact had the laptop in its possession for the previous ten months and knew its incriminating contents were authentically Hunter’s. From the New York Times and Washington Post down, the Democrat-friendly newspapers blacked-out the story. Twitter and Facebook throttled its distribution online, even by the New York Post itself. Pre-Elon Muusk's purchase, Twitter blocked the account of incumbent President Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany and then Trump’s account as well. Trump’s cancellation started January 8, 2021, and continued for nearly two years until Musk bought Twitter and reinstated the account. That pre-election censorship mattered. Biden won the presidency over Trump by 74 Electoral College votes. A post-election poll commissioned by the conservative Media Research Center showed 36% of Democrat voters didn’t know about the laptop, and 13% would not have voted for Biden if they had known. On analysis, such a 13% shift would have delivered Trump 289 college votes and a second term, in lieu of the four years of Biden and his advancing senility. (That now-admitted senility was hushed-up in yet another conspiracy by the Democrat-friendly media). The ABC, via another podcast by its same journo, Matt Bevan, has finally admitted that its October 2020 analysis was a whitewash, part of the leftist pile-on (“media frenzy,” in Bevan’s words) to suffocate truths inconvenient to Biden’s campaign and incumbency. “It was not my best work,” Bevan says in an understatement. I don’t think there has ever before been such an admission of bias and leftist groupthink by any ABC reporter or manager.[1] Bevan is one of the ABC’s most highly reputed ABC staffers. His profile:

Matt Bevan is the host and writer of the award-winning ABC News podcast If You're Listening. He has been a journalist at the ABC since 2008, and spent six years as newsreader for Radio National Breakfast. In 2022 he was awarded Podcast Host of the Year by Radio Today. In 2023 he was nominated for a Walkley Award for Explanatory Journalism.

Politics aside, he seems a smart, affable and likeable guy. He even starred as Mozart in Schaffer’s play Amadeus in Newcastle. Pardon my shortcut but according to Grok (with my emphases),

Matt Bevan is an acclaimed Australian journalist, podcast host, and broadcaster known for his sharp, narrative-driven coverage of international politics, particularly U.S. affairs. He breaks down complex global stories with a mix of historical context, on-the-ground reporting, and wry humour—often recording from what he describes as a cluttered basement [jokingly] to evade "assassins and authoritarian regimes” .

Born and raised in Newcastle, Bevan grew up in a media-savvy family. His father, Paul Bevan, was a presenter for 1233 ABC Newcastle…

In 2019, Bevan launched his breakthrough podcast series, focusing on the Trump administration's scandals and broader geopolitical intrigue.

For the curious, all of his four episodes in October 2020 involved hit jobs on Trump].[2]

The show quickly gained acclaim for its investigative depth and engaging style, with episodes exploring topics like the Mueller investigation, U.S. elections, and global authoritarianism. By mid-2023, ABC expanded it to include video versions, maintaining its weekly rhythm amid world events like coups, inflation, and AI disruptions…

In a March 2025 episode titled "The French Connection: why France never trusted Trump," he mentioned having four children, including a set of twins. He continues to balance family with his high-stakes journalism. Bevan's career exemplifies the ABC's commitment to probing international stories with Australian insight, making dense topics accessible and entertaining.

From the transcript of award-winner Bevan’s extraordinary admissions about his 2020 laptop report, the highlights

“The FBI had put everyone on high alert for Russian disinformation. In the frenzy of that news cycle, I also wrote an article expressing scepticism. It was not my best work.” (1min 30secs)

“These documents weren't leaked as a result of hacking or misinformation. In fact, they had nothing to do with Russia at all. This laptop, which was real, has put Hunter Biden at the centre of multiple conspiracy theories and criminal investigations.”

“It's clearly genuine too. This wasn't some AI-generated stuff cooked up in a Russian troll farm.”

“Joe Biden was accusing Donald Trump of corruption and being under the influence of foreign governments. And this story indicated that Biden was doing the exact same thing.[3] [Quoting Trump]: - ‘Stone cold crooked.’”[4]

“And right on cue Facebook and Twitter [took] the rather extraordinary step of blocking any link to the New York Post story. Of course, in the United States of America, land of free speech, this move was like dynamite.”

“Trump's team accused the US intelligence community, big tech companies and the mainstream media of acting like a cabal to protect the Biden family from criticism. And the thing is, this time, they actually did have a point.” (2:20).

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]mong journalists like myself, it’s painful to acknowledge initially missing a story and having to catch-up with stale material. This Bevan podcast confession was actually back last December 14. I doubt the confession was prompted by any pangs of conscience -- Matt had years to reconsider his 2020 misinformation, and the NYT and Washington Post had confessed in March 2022 (deep in their inside pages) that the laptop was authentic. Rather, Bevan’s mea culpa was precipitated by the furore about Biden pardoning son Hunter, by then an admitted felon, for any offences in the past decade.[5] [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap] came across Bevan’s 20-minute podcast this week during a random browse of abc.net.au. It had gone unremarked by the Australian media, perhaps because the ABC offered no transcript and prefaced the podcast with misdirection and mud-slinging:

Hunter Biden has been a main character in far-right conspiracy theories for years. In 2023 his laptop did come to light...

This a gross and self-serving ABC misrepresentation: the New York Post’s accurate front-page story appeared on October 14, 2020

...along with many sordid, embarrassing and incriminating details. Hunter was granted a full pardon - at the cost of reputational damage to his father and the country.

Intrigued, I made my own 2700-word transcript, which can be read in full here. It speaks for itself. Bevan last December described the 2020 laptop revelations as “very big and very strange” – i.e. they contradicted the leftist narrative and hence were dangerous and, in Bevan’s words, bound to be “simply bunkum”. However, some reporters are paid to check and report facts. The anti-Trump media, ABC included, for years checked no laptop facts, censored those who did, and pretended the scandal didn’t exist. The ABC’s sordid disinformation can be catalogued as follows:

October 20, 2020: David Lipson, for AM in Washington, begins the ABC’s takedown of the laptop revelations, linking them to “a Russian disinformation campaign”. He quotes the Democrat’s House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff:

“This whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin. But I guess at this point we can't be shocked by anything this [Trump] administration does, no matter how craven.”

It has often been noted that the Left accuses enemies of what it is doing itself. This further proves that assertion. Lipson continued that “there are big questions about the veracity of the story” in the Murdoch press, and he repeats New York Times disinformation that “it was written mostly by a staff writer who refused to put his name on it” – strange behaviour for journos putting out a genuine scoop. And anyway, says Lipson, Trump-supporting New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was pushing the story:

“Once published, Facebook and Twitter curbed the story's distribution online...

under pressure, it should be noted, from the FBI

...and multiple [Democrat-friendly] news outlets have suggested the FBI is investigating whether the report is part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

The FBI, as since admitted, knew perfectly well the Post scoop was accurate. Lipson quoted Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, speaking on Murdoch’s Fox News, saying the intelligence community was playing politics over the laptop. Lipson then undermined Ratcliffe’s credibility:

But here's the kicker. Before his appointment to the role this year, John Ratcliffe was a Republican member of Congress, a staunch Trump loyalist … Now he's America's most senior intelligence officer and weighing in on an election issue 15 days out from the poll.

More left-field projection: it was leftists’ own Deep State interfering with the intent to get Biden elected].[6] October 23, 2020: ABC gives us Matt Bevan’s now self-discredited piece, “Joe Biden and Hunter Biden have been accused of corruption, but there's good reason to be sceptical.” It was followed by three year 'ABC silence on the laptop. September 13, 2023: In a piece for 7.30 from correspondent Barbara Miller, she remarked about

a narrative pursued by the conservative media and factions of the Republican Party that [Hunter] had drawn his father into dodgy dealings - accusations fuelled by files allegedly recovered from an abandoned laptop.

Note how Miller bags the story simply because the “conservative media” ran it. On the same day Hamish Macdonald on ABC Radio National was having two-bob each way:

Hunter has had lots of trouble with drugs and alcohol abuse and has been embroiled - sometimes falsely it seems - but sometimes actually - in controversies over emails on his laptop.

The ABC does nine more months’ silence on the laptop, and then comes this: June 5, 2024: ABC News ran a four-minute piece, also from reporter Barbara Miller, headed “Laptop from Hell” on Hunter’s gun-licence perjury trial. She remarks merely that the prosecution was using material from the laptop. Miller neglects to mention that in the ABC’s narrative, the laptop's scandalous content was still "Russian disinformation". Six months further silence, then, December 2, 2024: ABC News Daily’s John Barron, co-host of Planet America, opined under the headline “How can Joe Biden justify pardoning his son?”:

And there was definitely a sense that Hunter Biden, by spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars on his drug addiction, by using sex workers, by having a laptop computer with incriminating pornographic images of himself and others...

Just porn, John, is that all? What of family corruption?

...this was all being used to damage Joe Biden through his son. But Hunter Biden was never found guilty of anything relating to that.

So that’s all OK then. Even by the Biden crime family metrics, “hundreds of millions” does seem a lot of unsourced money to blow on crack and hookers. The accurate figure is that Hunter’s corruption netted him some $US8.3 million between 2014 and 2019. December 3, 2024: ABC Radio National Breakfast (Producer: Matt Simpson) did a soft interview with ex-law professor Kermit Roosevelt on Joe pardoning Hunter after saying adamantly that he wouldn’t. Roosevelt didn’t mention the laptop, nor did Radio National mention that its guest, Professor Roosevelt, just happened to have donated $US5100 to Democrat politicians over time, including $US1550 to Obama himself, and $US1000 to John Kerry. How can anyone trust the ABC when it won’t reveal such facts about its partisan interview subjects? December 12, 2024: Matt Bevan confesses he screwed up on the laptop story December 2024-October 6 2025: Nothing more from ABC about the laptop. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]’ll now traverse Bevan’s original 2020 laptop story, and then compare it with his epiphany last December. He began his 2020 epic with a sneer at the Murdoch media for doing actual journalism:

As American [Democrat-friendly] media outlets wrestle with whether or not to publish information …Sky News Australia, The Daily Telegraph and the Australian have happily broadcast and published their thoughts. They are running big front page stories, based on nothing but [Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s] say-so.

False: their sister publication New York Post had verified the laptop’s authenticity.[7]

Bevan: These stories, alleging corruption on the part of the Bidens, are also partially behind President Donald Trump's newest campaign chant: ‘Lock him up’.

Irony experts will recall the Democrat machine’s nation-wide lawfare under Biden to remove Trump from state ballots, bankrupt him, and jail him, potentially for decades, on preposterous made-to-order charges in New York at the height of the 2024 election season. There was even speculation whether Trump might have to campaign from a prison cell.

Bevan: “At one rally this week, Mr Trump blasted the Biden family over the story, which is based on a laptop that supposedly belonged to Hunter Biden.”

Enjoy that “supposedly”, folks.

Bevan: To begin with, it must be noted that the central premise of the stories is false.

Bevan, wearing his SC’s wig beneath a Sherlock Holmes deer-stalker, rejects any notion that Joe Biden was corrupt in relation to Ukraine’s Burisma gas company. That Burisma just happened to put Hunter, Joe’s talentless crack-head, on the board at $US83,333 per month. Bevan: Despite multiple investigations by media and government into this series of events, a years-long campaign has been mounted to try and claim that something corrupt happened.” Justice Dept whistleblowers have since disclosed how their bosses ordered them to back off from any investigation of Joe Biden’s finances, and higher-ups sabotaged the legal processes by, among other ruses, dragging the investigation's feet until the Statute of Limitations kicked in.

Bevan asked: Who is behind the story being pushed by the Trump campaign?

He cites Rudy Giuliani and “a very suspicious cast of characters” including Ukrainians with ties to Russian intelligence, i.e. the Trump-Russia-collusion hoax.

Then, starting at the beginning of 2020, reports emerged...

from the Deep State propaganda machine and its handmaiden media sycophants

...that Russian government hackers had gained access to the emails of Hunter Biden, and were planning to release them before the 2020 election, timed to do maximum damage to his father's campaign, in a direct re-running of their [pathetically inconsequential] 2016 US election interference campaign.

It was unclear from the reporting [by whom?] whether they [Rus

How Treasury Lost its Intellectual Standing

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 05:10:56 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]B[/fusion_dropcap]efore beginning my review proper of Changing Fortunes, several things should be said. First, this book has involved an enormous amount of painstaking research by Paul Tilley—a former Treasury officer—and contains, in its nine appendices alone, a wealth of carefully ordered factual information which, to my knowledge, has never before been made so readily available. Second, it is accurately described as “a” history of the Treasury. Professional historians would doubtless write the history differently, in terms of coverage or perspective. Nevertheless, and whatever my criticisms below, the book is valuable, being the first real attempt at a history of one of Australia’s great institutions. Greg Whitwell’s The Treasury Line (1986) was valuable but much more limited. The production of the only previous history of the department, The Centenary of Treasury 1901–2001: 100 Years of Public Service (2001), written to celebrate the centenary of Australia’s founding, was entrusted, inexplicably, to a firm of consultants, and the result was shamefully inadequate. So Tilley is filling a long-standing gap, and for that we should all be grateful.

From our October 2019 issue. Click here to subscribe

Third, it is quickly clear that Tilley, while undoubtedly seeking to present an objective appraisal of events, does so from a certain political perspective. The first clue to that is the foreword, entrusted to Greg Smith, whose devotion to the Labor Party quickly became clear to me, as Treasury Secretary, when he joined the department—a devotion that has only strengthened since. Other telltale signs could be listed, including having the book launched (at the ANU, naturally) by Michelle Grattan, whom I have known for over forty-five years, and whose philosophical attachment to Labor has never wavered. Fourth and finally, on opening the book and applying the late Frank Devine’s “index test”, I was astonished to find more page references to myself than to any other individual (including such truly noteworthy people as Paul Keating and John Howard). I also figure predominantly in the bibliography. Although the Editor of Quadrant foresees no problem in my reviewing the book, I confess to some unease about what will inescapably be some self-referential comments. Balance Tilley is notably stronger in recording the post-Whitlam years than the 1901–1975 period. This doubtless reflects his own experience in entering the Treasury in the mid-1980s, but is none the less regrettable, resulting in some important events being inadequately treated—in the Loans Affair case, grossly so. The first major example—Tilley’s treatment of the Premiers’ Plan for dealing with the externally induced onset of the Great Depression—presents a “conventional wisdom” analysis. In fact, the Premiers’ Plan, notwithstanding criticism of its “austerity” by the usual proponents of what would later be called “Keynesian” fiscal stimulus policies, resulted in Australia’s recovering years earlier than countries that did adopt such policies. Keynes himself later admitted, in a Melbourne Herald article following a visit to Australia, that it had been a remarkably successful response. None of this is even hinted at by Tilley. More significant is Tilley’s superficial coverage of the Whitlam government’s two major economic disasters. I refer first to the 1974-75 budget. Though presented by Treasurer Frank Crean, this was almost entirely the work of his successor-to-be, Jim Cairns. Advancing the “expansionist” nostrums of the so-called “Adelaide School”, and misled by an unforgivable analytical error by an adviser to the Minister for Urban and Regional Development, Michael Keating, Cairns blew out budget expenditure by an originally estimated 32.4 per cent (outcome, 39.6 per cent). Only after Cairns’s later sacking over the Loans Affair and his replacement by Bill Hayden was some degree of budgetary order restored, but by then the government’s fate was sealed. To this pivotal event in our fiscal history, which produced a rise in spending as a proportion of GDP from 18.4 per cent in 1973-74 to 24.3 per cent in 1975-76, Tilley devotes a cursory two pages. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he second major disaster of Whitlam’s years was not just of economic significance. The Loans Affair (to this day, capitalised whenever mentioned) was also the greatest political disaster, not only for Whitlam’s government (where it had a lot of competition), but for any government in Australia’s history. One might therefore have expected Tilley to cover it in some detail, and to draw from it some lessons (for example, the result of selecting party political trusties, rather than public servants proper, to head departments) relevant to some of his later themes. One can only ponder why his treatment of this episode is not merely inadequate but, as remarked earlier, grossly so. The Loans Affair began in November 1974 when the Minister for Labour and Immigration, Clyde Cameron, was approached by one Tirath Khemlani, who claimed to be able, via unnamed Middle Eastern sources, to borrow almost unlimited amounts of petro-dollars that, following the 1973 “oil shock”, were then flooding international financial markets. Cameron conveyed this approach to the Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor, a man chiefly notable for his contempt for business leaders generally and mining industry leaders (his “hillbillies”) in particular. Deeply committed to a vast infrastructure program, with gas pipelines criss-crossing the continent (in what, to anticipate a later usage of the phrase in a different context, might have been aptly described as “spaghetti nation”), Connor was frustrated by lack of funding for his vision. In all this Connor was supported by the permanent head (as departmental secretaries were then still called) of his department, Sir Lennox Hewitt. I was then Deputy Secretary (Economic) of the Treasury, under then Secretary Sir Frederick Wheeler, and my personal papers include a complete record (five bulging files) of the Loans Affair from the moment in December 1974 when it was first brought to Treasury’s attention by the Attorney-General’s Department (approached by Hewitt seeking legal advice about projected loan raisings by his minister). Over the next seven months, Wheeler fought tirelessly to warn not only Cairns, who had become Treasurer a few days after we first learned of the matter, but also Whitlam, both directly as opportunity offered, and via his recently appointed departmental head, John Menadue—a political appointee who, to Whitlam’s cost, was not up to his job. Treasury, through its representatives in London and New York and its long-standing contacts with the Union Bank of Switzerland, quickly learned that Khemlani was just a con man. (Some years later he was arrested in New York and jailed for passing dud cheques.) By this time, however, the Loans Affair was well and truly launched, with Whitlam, Connor, Cairns and Attorney-General Lionel Murphy having signed (ironically, on Friday, December 13) an Executive Council minute authorising Connor to arrange a US$4 billion borrowing. As the days ticked by, Connor was reported sleeping in his ministerial office so that he could immediately receive the telex message by which Khemlani had promised to inform him when the borrowing was effected. What he received instead was a string of excuses always promising “jam tomorrow”. The original Executive Council minute was revoked in January 1975 on the grounds of Khemlani’s non-performance; but instead of then leaving what was already not-so-well alone, the government replaced it in February 1975 with a new Executive Council minute authorising a US$2 billion borrowing. This authority remained in force until May, when it was finally revoked; but meanwhile, to render things even more chaotic, Cairns had embarked on a frolic of his own, issuing a letter to a Melbourne acquaintance, one George Harris, authorising him to seek borrowings on the government’s behalf which, if successful, would result in payment of a large commission to Harris. So much for the course of events. Meanwhile, however, a storm of journalistic rumour and Opposition political questioning had begun to build. What else was to be expected when people like Khemlani and Harris were traipsing around financial markets, displaying their borrowing “credentials” to every merchant banker they approached? Wheeler had maintained a meticulous record of this Affair from the day we first heard of it. When news of the Harris letter reached us, he sought advice from the Attorney-General’s Department on whether such a letter constituted a commitment to pay a secret (unauthorised) commission. Confirmation that it did was conveyed to Whitlam. After Whitlam learned of the Wheeler record (a copy of which he then demanded and was given), this led both to the termination of Connor’s authority and the eventual (July 1975) sacking of Cairns. So far from being grateful to Wheeler for his due diligence, however, Whitlam’s over-riding reaction was to seek to shoot the messenger! What does Tilley say about these momentous (or as Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser was to call them, “reprehensible”) events? He devotes only three pages to them (in a 450-page text). While the facts, or most of them, are set down accurately enough, what is lacking is any sense of the drama of an episode that, after all, led to the premature fall of the Whitlam government. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Whitlam years once behind him, three other matters are worth mentioning in assessing the “balance” of Tilley’s coverage: the splitting of the Treasury, the dollar devaluation episode and the response of the Rudd and Gillard governments to the Global Financial Crisis. Malcolm Fraser’s 1976 decision to split the Treasury arose from a meeting of Cabinet’s Economic Committee in which the Treasury, backed up by then Treasurer Phillip Lynch and the Reserve Bank Governor, successfully resisted Fraser’s push to devalue the dollar immediately by 17.5 per cent. Fraser’s anger, and his decision to proceed with the split, was magnified (understandably) by a Kenneth Davidson article in the Age a few days later giving a detailed, and accurate, account of how Fraser had been “bested” in the Economic Committee meeting. (There was more to this leak which, I am sorry to say, did not reflect well on Wheeler, but I shall leave it there.) Although I believed then, and still do, that the split would lead (as it subsequently did) to less effective government control of a bureaucracy always well-disposed to spending, there is clearly room for two opinions, and Tilley’s treatment is not to be faulted merely because he holds the other one. Tilley treats the 1983 dollar devaluation episode, including my own role in it, at length. While recounting fully the criticisms that rained down upon the Treasury, and me personally, at the time, he also makes a genuine effort to establish where the truth lay. As he says:

While Stone, as Secretary to the Treasury, was opposed to the decision … taken on 9 December, he has since argued that this did not mean Treasury opposed floating the exchange rate in principle. Rather, it was about timing and sequencing. It is this claim that I will seek to assess.

He is then as good as his word. I shall not traverse the detail, which is comprehensively set out on pages 172 to 183, other than to note what he says about the role of the Reserve Bank:

Selwyn Cornish [with access to the RBA archives as the Bank’s official historian] set out in an article how the Bank, with Johnston as Governor … had been discussing the RBA’s views with the Treasurer during 1983. Stone has said that these discussions were not reported to him, which he believes was in contravention of the Reserve Bank Act, which provides that the bank Governor and the Treasury secretary keep each other fully informed on matters of joint concern.

Suffice to say that in the end I find myself acquitted: “I think, however, that the evidence supports Stone’s claim that his position was changing from around October 1983, and from that point on he did support moving to a deregulated exchange rate, albeit more slowly.” In his discussion of the devaluation episode, and elsewhere, Tilley often refers to the “conservative” nature of Treasury advice to successive governments under Secretaries prepared to give such “frank and fearless” advice despite knowing it would not be palatable to the government. As my last examination of the book’s balance, I have therefore chosen his coverage of Rudd’s and Gillard’s governments response to the Global Financial Crisis. In mid-October 2008 the Rudd government, on advice from Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, brought down a $10.4 billion fiscal stimulus package to combat the domestic effects of the GFC. Treasury later argued, and Tilley seems to accept, that this saved Australia from recession. This claim is highly questionable. Much more important was the series of sharp cuts in the RBA’s official cash rate which, feeding through to equally sharp cuts in household mortgage payments, considerably enhanced household disposable incomes. However that may be, what is hardly in question is that a second fiscal stimulus package in February 2009, amounting to $42 billion over the forward estimates, was of little or no relevance to combating the GFC, but set up Labor’s budgets for a series of huge deficits in the years ahead. There seems to be no record of Treasury opposing this fiscal stupidity, and Tilley’s treatment of the whole episode, while factually accurate, lacks any “bite” so far as the role of the Henry Treasury is concerned. So much for these specific instances of imbalance. More generally, the book suffers from a too-heavy weighting towards taxation policy. While Tilley has worked in numerous policy areas, it is clear that his first love still lies where his Treasury career began, in the Taxation and Industry Division. This Division, headed by a strongly Labor-affiliated officer in David Morgan, also contained Greg Smith. It would hardly be surprising if a young new recruit should find himself influenced by such strong personalities; the excessive space devoted to tax policy may find its origin there. Themes Tilley pursues throughout two separable, but related, themes. He is chiefly concerned with the waxing and waning over the years of Treasury’s “influence” over governments. Treasury, he says:

finds itself on the horns of a dilemma regarding its role with government. To be influential it needs to be close to government, but not so close as to compromise its ability to provide frank and fearless advice … This book seeks to assess how it has navigated this dilemma.

Assessing the related roles of successive Treasury Secretaries, Tilley notes the change, gradual at first but gathering pace, from those who gave “frank and fearless” advice even when knowing their governments would not relish it, to the situation today where, beginning with Ken Henry and continuing a fortiori with Martin Parkinson, Treasury’s advice (when given at all) has become totally “responsive” to the government’s policies. (John Fraser’s three-and-a-half-year “interregnum” did something to stop the rot, but was not long enough to reverse it.) When I joined Treasury in 1954 it was led by Sir Roland Wilson, whom I have elsewhere described as having been the greatest public servant in the Commonwealth’s history, with the possible exception of Sir Robert Garran. His advice to the Menzies government, combining both his outstanding intellect and his powers of forceful expression, was an example to us all. In 1966 he was succeeded by Sir Richard (“Dick”) Randall, who not only gave equally forthright advice to the Holt, Gorton and McMahon governments, but also insisted on that advice being committed to paper. Nothing was more important, he said, than “the power of print”. In turn, his late 1971 successor, Sir Frederick Wheeler, while more of a “mandarin” than either Wilson or Randall, still never swerved from the “frank and fearless” principle. Tilley’s conclusion on him is that he “was ultimately a controversial figure because of his role in the Loans Affair”, suggesting that Wheeler’s conduct then was wrong-headed because it brought him into conflict with the government and thereby caused Treasury to lose “influence”. On the contrary, it was his finest hour, and my admiration of him during those seven months, in which he fought to save the Whitlam government from its own folly, remains unstinting. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hich brings me, I fear, to myself. To quote Tilley:

Wheeler was replaced by John Stone as Secretary in 1979. Stone, undaunted by the Prime Minister’s wrath three years earlier, continued the approach of Treasury providing large amounts of forthright advice—including when it was not asked for … The traditional method of providing written briefs with a clear policy recommendation was followed … The upside of this approach was that Treasury provided clear policy advice—frank and fearless. The downside was that the Treasury’s advice was at times ignored when it was inconsistent with the government’s policy direction—a lack of responsiveness.

After Keating became Treasurer in March 1983 my relationship with him, although fully formal on my part, was entirely cordial; but after the floating of the dollar in December, “Stone was painted as the villain of the piece and his relationship with Keating never recovered”. As Tilley rightly says:

The departure of Stone [in September 1984] marked the end of the very formal relationship between Treasury and the government. Wheeler and Stone had steered Treasury through some very difficult and bruising times … With Wilson, Randall, Wheeler and Stone as secretaries, the department’s relationship with the government was generally a formal one, with the roles of Treasury and the Treasurer quite distinct … With [my successor, Bernie] Fraser as Secretary … a different, less formal relationship emerged.

Yes, indeed, to the point where, after Keating had later made Fraser Governor of the RBA, he boasted publicly that he “had the Reserve Bank in his pocket”! I pass over (without in any way seeking to diminish) Fraser’s two immediate successors, Chris Higgins and Tony Cole, and come to the appointment of Ted Evans, who served both Keating and Costello before retiring in April 2001. My only criticism of Ted, whom I otherwise hold in the highest regard, was that, while giving forthright advice himself to both those Treasurers, he clearly groomed Ken Henry to be appointed his successor, after which time (with Henry followed by the ineffable Martin Parkinson) it has been downhill all the way. As Tilley (despite his personal regard for both of them) concedes, “if it was known that the Treasurer did not agree with a position … no policy advice would be provided … In an effort to be seen to be more responsive, Treasury largely went along with this changing relationship …” Conclusion Tilley’s assessment of how Treasury has “navigated” what he sees as the dilemma of its relationship with Treasurers suffers, I believe, from a crucial failure of insight. While he is correct in seeing that providing advice to a government that has no appetite for it can, and does, lead to a loss of “influence”, what he fails to comprehend is the effect on the department of doing otherwise. A Treasury giving honest advice to its minister will be a Treasury in which bright young people want to work. One which retreats into the coward’s castle of “responsiveness” will quickly earn their disdain and early departure. The resulting decline in the department’s intellectual standing is a heavy price to pay. Tilley recognises what has happened to the department:

Post [the Keating and Costello years], however, the pendulum continued to swing towards responsiveness … A relentless push for greater responsiveness … dragged Treasury into a relationship where, when it mattered, policy advice was often not being provided.

Or, as his back-cover blurb notes: “Treasury has been dragged closer to government and in the process become a less effective policy adviser.” Perhaps I may have the last word. As Tilley records:

At his farewell drinks, Stone emphasised the different, and separable, role for ministers and departments: “Always remember that ministers are a different category of beings. No matter how much you may feel you have got close to them and they have become friends of yours, when the chips are down

The Great John Stone

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:07:28 +1100
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]ith John Stone, whom we both honour and mourn today, it’s hard to find any sphere in which he did not excel. He was a brilliant student. He was outstanding at sport. He was the 1951 West Australian Rhodes Scholar. He swiftly rose through the ranks of the Australian Treasury, in those days, clearly, the elite of the Australian Public Service. For five years, he was the Treasury head; and, in that capacity, helped to tutor Paul Keating, Labor’s greatest treasurer, and less directly, Bob Hawke, Labor’s greatest prime minister. He was, for three years, a member of the Australian Senate and a Coalition frontbencher. He is the only federal departmental head, thus far, subsequently to be elected to the federal parliament. And after leaving parliament, as well as serving on the boards of some leading public companies, he was a fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs, a friend of the Centre for Independent Studies, and the leading spirit in the foundation of two important intellectual bodies: the H.R. Nicholls Society—to promote freedom of association in the workplace; and the Samuel Griffith Society—to promote respect for our Constitution and for the rule of law more generally. As well, John was a prodigious contributor to newspapers and magazines—especially Quadrant—to which he gave an almost sublimely perceptive essay on the imperfectability of politics, in which he declared, rightly in my opinion, that John Winston Howard was our greatest ever prime minister. In everything he did, his great stay and strength, his soulmate, was his late wife Nancy—who, for years, kept the H.R. Nicholls and the Samuel Griffith societies going; and his great pride was his children—all of whom, in their own way, are faithful reflections of their parents. John Stone was an intellectual perfectionist. He wanted everything to be the very best—whether that was a Treasury minute, the policy of a government, or the state of our nation. Naturally enough, he was often disappointed—especially with politicians—because politics is the art of the possible, even if its best practitioners are constantly seeking to expand the bounds of what’s possible in the best possible direction. It’s typical of John that he wanted governments to do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way. It’s often said that he opposed the decision of the Hawke government, late in 1983, to float the dollar. Indeed, this canard has been repeated in some of the obituaries. In fact, what he opposed was the lack of due process: a governmental decision, made without a proper Cabinet discussion, and without proper Treasury advice, about all the other policies that might have to be changed in order to optimise the decision to float. But as he said, in his rightly celebrated Shann Memorial Lecture in 1984—delivered, quite properly, after he had already resigned as Treasury head—the decision to float the dollar was one of the best decisions ever made for the long-term benefit of our economy. It’s also typical of John that, having made it abundantly clear what he thought, he never bothered to take issue with the critics—leaving the crystal-clear record to speak for itself. In that Shann Memorial Lecture—ostensibly about fiscal extravagance, tariff protection, and industrial arbitration—John was actually highlighting three much deeper and more abiding faults in our Australian approach to government: first: our tendency to think that government—especially government spending—can solve all problems; second, our tendency to think that somehow, we can shield ourselves from competition and what’s going on in the wider world; and third, that workers live in a different economic universe—one governed by a Thomistic notion of the just price. John’s message, then, is just as relevant today as it was in 1984. We are running deficits stretching as far as the eye can see. We have a government addicted to subsidising politically correct business ventures. And we have a workforce once more being subjected to attempted union control—even if that means fewer jobs and less prosperity. Not for a moment, though, do these recurring challenges suggest that John failed in his efforts to counter economic folly—merely that some battles are never finally won. In that 1984 Shann lecture, John described our political class as “unworthy men masquerading as leaders”. Perhaps that was an overly harsh description of the parliament that then included our best Labor and our best Liberal prime ministers. But it did hint at the great truth: that no elected politician—indeed, probably no human being—can be as good as he or she should be. Our challenge is not to achieve an impossible perfection, but “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” in the quest to be better. The fact that he himself sought, just three years later, to become one of those “unworthy men masquerading as leaders” was actually John’s tribute to the significance of public life. And his failure, in 1990, to win the seat of Fairfax, was no reflection on him—just on a generally miserable national campaign. Anyone, indeed, who could beat Bob Hawke in an election—the 1951 University of Western Australia Guild election—had the right stuff for public life. Inevitably, because this is a funeral, today there is a sense of loss; we are sad because we are human. But really, we should be uplifted and inspired by this life that testifies to so many wonderful possibilities, if only we are prepared to “have a go”, which John always was. There’s a figure of speech referencing “drips wearing down stone”; I like to think that John was a stone wearing down drips! At the close of his Shann lecture, John posed the question: “Have Australians, today, the will to do great things together again?” He believed that we have. So what is there to be said but this: we should not let him down. The Hon. Tony Abbott delivered this eulogy at the funeral of John Stone, which was held at St John’s Anglican Church, Ashfield, on July 30.
The post The Great John Stone first appeared on Quadrant.

Matt Bevan on Hunter Biden’s Laptop

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 21:05:00 +1100

Bevan (Transcript: 14/12/25): Three weeks before the 2026 US election a Very big and very strange story broke in the papers. Trump: We’ve just learned through explosive documents published by a very fine newspaper, the New York Post. Bevan: Donald Trump thought that these documents, found on an apparently abandoned laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, proved that Joe Biden was involved in corrupt business dealings in Ukraine and China. Trump: These emails show that Biden’s repeated claim that he has never spoken to Hunter about his business dealings were a complete lie. It was a total lie. […]
The post Matt Bevan on Hunter Biden’s Laptop first appeared on Quadrant.

Multiculturalism’s Berlin Wall Moment

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 11:15:58 +1100

Civilised societies are woven, not engineered. That’s a fundamental truth very often not merely ignored but condemned
The post Multiculturalism’s Berlin Wall Moment first appeared on Quadrant.

Nasty, Brutish, Just Somewhat Longer

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 05:53:00 +1100

The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism John Gray London, Penguin, 2023, 179pp
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]his short but power-packed book is written by one of the UK’s leading political philosophers. John Gray, born 1948, was a former Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and a former Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and is a prominent, difficult-to-pigeon-hole theorist, prolific author and columnist (for the likes of The Guardian and the New Statesman). The book helpfully contains regular apposite quotations from the renowned 1651 work, Leviathan, by English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Thus, on the first page, Gray quotes the famous passage (emphasis added):
…during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war is of. . . every man, against every man . . . In such a condition, there is . . . and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. -- Leviathan, chapter 11
So who are ‘the New Leviathians’? They are, argues Gray, the post-liberal states that are jockeying for position in the contemporary geo-political landscape. The EU and the US, are confronted by Russia and China, as well as rising nations such as India, and all these oligarchs live and move and have their being surrounded by ungoverned zones. The emergence of a volatile post-liberal world is central to Gray’s book:
During the short post-Cold War era of globalization, a ‘rules-based’ global liberal order seemed to be in place, which some believed would endure indefinitely. This supposed liberal order is now history. If there ever was such a system, it exists no longer. Its passing has exposed the realities it concealed. (p 47)
The note of triumphalism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union was best encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 essay, The End of History? (later expanded into the book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), with the question mark in the title now dropped). American political philosopher, Professor Fukuyama, asserted that liberal democratic capitalism was the apotheosis of world history and constituted the final blessed climax of centuries of political and intellectual turmoil. Poor Fukuyama, sniffs Gray, “he joined a Hegelian philosophy of history with a Hayekian ideology of social evolution [and the] result was a farrago of errors and fallacies, along with occasional insights.” (p 19) Gray writes beautifully. On the demise of liberalism:
Liberalism has once again become a creature eating its own tail. The current generation of liberals never tires of denouncing the West as the most destructive force of history---racist, imperialist and sexist. Education must be ’de-colonized’ in order to expose the West’s unique crimes. Western civilization has become a curse for humankind.

Yet these same liberals insist that liberal values -- human rights, personal autonomy and the like -- must be projected to the last corners of the Earth. The avowed goal is to liberate human beings from the identities they have accidentally acquired. Stripped of these contingencies they can be whatever they wish. (p 69)
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]B[/fusion_dropcap]ack to the New Leviathans (hereafter “NLs”), Gray notes some key differences between them and the originals. First, they are much more ambitious in their aims. The original Leviathan, faced with the war-riven state of nature, sought to constrain freedom for the immediate goal of domestic peace and protection against foreign enemies. The new version’s goals are more far-reaching: the NLs “aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects … the new Leviathans are engineers of the soul” (pp 2-3). Second, the NLs’ means are different. The Leviathan utilised state coercion. The NLs turn to non-government means. Civil society institutions (for instance, libraries, museums, galleries) are the vehicle, as well as the private sector's hi-tech behemoths. Third, the NLs oddly enough harken back to a pre-liberal and pre-Enlightenment era. Gray suggests we may be embracing (whether we like it or not) a neo-feudalism (p 131). At the very least, the NL order is illiberal and despotic. We witness, maintains Gray, irony and paradox aplenty:
The liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom. Any curb on human will is condemned as a mode of repression. If human beings inflict harm on others it is because society has injured them. When these injustices have been corrected everyone can live as they please...

By a droll necessity, this freedom requires that every aspect of life be monitored and controlled. Language must be purified of any traces of thought-crime. The mind must cease to be a private realm and come under scrutiny for its hidden biases and errors. As Dostoevsky anticipated in Demons, the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism. (p 154)(bold added)
Although an atheist, Gray is not shy in emphasizing the debt that liberalism owed to Christianity. The four defining ideas of liberalism, according to Gray (pp 4-5) and described in his valuable book Liberalism (1986), are all derived from fundamental premises of Christianity. Liberalism is, explained Gray: [1] individualistic, [2] egalitarian, [3] universalist, and [4] meliorist. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he primacy of the individual is, submits Gray, a secular translation of the monotheistic belief that all men are created in the image of God (imago Dei), who has authority over mankind that transcends any worldly power. The egalitarian belief that all people have the same moral and legal status reproduces the notion that all men are equal in the sight of God. The universalism that teaches that one’s human commonalities outweigh any tribal or cultural identities is similarly anchored in the notion of imago Dei. Finally, the belief that human institutions are indefinitely improvable draws upon “the theistic faith that history is a moral narrative of sin followed by redemption.” (p 116) There is so much more valuable terrain that I could traverse, but I will leave that to the reader. I will conclude with two final comments. First, Gray has a serious swipe at science’s claim -- or at least the pretensions of science’s bastard cousin, Scientism -- to neutrality.
[Scientists’] belief in the liberating power of science is more contrary to reason than any traditional faith, for it ignores the well-attested fact that science can just as well serve oppression as freedom. (p 66)

Socratism [the belief that reason can bring order into human affairs] is the true faith of the modern West: science can redeem humankind from evil and tragedy. In reality, science serves whatever impulses drive the human animal, including a passion for destruction. (p 155)
Second, I tip my hat to Gray’s pungent turn of phrase. He notes the unfortunate rise in the West of the “antinomian intelligentsia” (p 69) and the “swollen lumpen-intelligentsia” (p 70). These benighted folk (“surplus elites”) “profess to instruct society by deconstructing its institutions and values”(p 69). The anti-Western creed of the antinomian intelligentsia (call it “Woke thinking”, if you wish, adds Gray), “provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity.” (p 110) I note that Gray (p 69) quotes Hobbes’ observation on what might be unkindly described as the “surplus elites” of his day:
The universities have been to the nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans. -- Hobbes, Behemoth, Dialogue 1
The New Leviathans was a pleasure to read, a compact storehouse of political erudition, and a book, as readers may have noticed, eminently quotable. Rex Ahdar is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Otago
The post Nasty, Brutish, Just Somewhat Longer first appeared on Quadrant.

Nasty and Brutish, Just Somewhat Longer

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 05:53:00 +1100

The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism John Gray London, Penguin, 2023, 179pp
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]his short but power-packed book is written by one of the UK’s leading political philosophers. John Gray, born 1948, was a former Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and a former Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and is a prominent, difficult-to-pigeon-hole theorist, prolific author and columnist (for the likes of The Guardian and the New Statesman). The book helpfully contains regular apposite quotations from the renowned 1651 work, Leviathan, by English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Thus, on the first page, Gray quotes the famous passage (emphasis added):
…during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war is of. . . every man, against every man . . . In such a condition, there is . . . and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. -- Leviathan, chapter 11
So who are ‘the New Leviathians’? They are, argues Gray, the post-liberal states that are jockeying for position in the contemporary geo-political landscape. The EU and the US, are confronted by Russia and China, as well as rising nations such as India, and all these oligarchs live and move and have their being surrounded by ungoverned zones. The emergence of a volatile post-liberal world is central to Gray’s book:
During the short post-Cold War era of globalization, a ‘rules-based’ global liberal order seemed to be in place, which some believed would endure indefinitely. This supposed liberal order is now history. If there ever was such a system, it exists no longer. Its passing has exposed the realities it concealed. (p 47)
The note of triumphalism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union was best encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 essay, The End of History? (later expanded into the book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), with the question mark in the title now dropped). American political philosopher, Professor Fukuyama, asserted that liberal democratic capitalism was the apotheosis of world history and constituted the final blessed climax of centuries of political and intellectual turmoil. Poor Fukuyama, sniffs Gray, “he joined a Hegelian philosophy of history with a Hayekian ideology of social evolution [and the] result was a farrago of errors and fallacies, along with occasional insights.” (p 19) Gray writes beautifully. On the demise of liberalism:
Liberalism has once again become a creature eating its own tail. The current generation of liberals never tires of denouncing the West as the most destructive force of history---racist, imperialist and sexist. Education must be ’de-colonized’ in order to expose the West’s unique crimes. Western civilization has become a curse for humankind.

Yet these same liberals insist that liberal values -- human rights, personal autonomy and the like -- must be projected to the last corners of the Earth. The avowed goal is to liberate human beings from the identities they have accidentally acquired. Stripped of these contingencies they can be whatever they wish. (p 69)
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]B[/fusion_dropcap]ack to the New Leviathans (hereafter “NLs”), Gray notes some key differences between them and the originals. First, they are much more ambitious in their aims. The original Leviathan, faced with the war-riven state of nature, sought to constrain freedom for the immediate goal of domestic peace and protection against foreign enemies. The new version’s goals are more far-reaching: the NLs “aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects … the new Leviathans are engineers of the soul” (pp 2-3). Second, the NLs’ means are different. The Leviathan utilised state coercion. The NLs turn to non-government means. Civil society institutions (for instance, libraries, museums, galleries) are the vehicle, as well as the private sector's hi-tech behemoths. Third, the NLs oddly enough harken back to a pre-liberal and pre-Enlightenment era. Gray suggests we may be embracing (whether we like it or not) a neo-feudalism (p 131). At the very least, the NL order is illiberal and despotic. We witness, maintains Gray, irony and paradox aplenty:
The liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom. Any curb on human will is condemned as a mode of repression. If human beings inflict harm on others it is because society has injured them. When these injustices have been corrected everyone can live as they please...

By a droll necessity, this freedom requires that every aspect of life be monitored and controlled. Language must be purified of any traces of thought-crime. The mind must cease to be a private realm and come under scrutiny for its hidden biases and errors. As Dostoevsky anticipated in Demons, the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism. (p 154)(bold added)
Although an atheist, Gray is not shy in emphasizing the debt that liberalism owed to Christianity. The four defining ideas of liberalism, according to Gray (pp 4-5) and described in his valuable book Liberalism (1986), are all derived from fundamental premises of Christianity. Liberalism is, explained Gray: [1] individualistic, [2] egalitarian, [3] universalist, and [4] meliorist. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he primacy of the individual is, submits Gray, a secular translation of the monotheistic belief that all men are created in the image of God (imago Dei), who has authority over mankind that transcends any worldly power. The egalitarian belief that all people have the same moral and legal status reproduces the notion that all men are equal in the sight of God. The universalism that teaches that one’s human commonalities outweigh any tribal or cultural identities is similarly anchored in the notion of imago Dei. Finally, the belief that human institutions are indefinitely improvable draws upon “the theistic faith that history is a moral narrative of sin followed by redemption.” (p 116) There is so much more valuable terrain that I could traverse, but I will leave that to the reader. I will conclude with two final comments. First, Gray has a serious swipe at science’s claim -- or at least the pretensions of science’s bastard cousin, Scientism -- to neutrality.
[Scientists’] belief in the liberating power of science is more contrary to reason than any traditional faith, for it ignores the well-attested fact that science can just as well serve oppression as freedom. (p 66)

Socratism [the belief that reason can bring order into human affairs] is the true faith of the modern West: science can redeem humankind from evil and tragedy. In reality, science serves whatever impulses drive the human animal, including a passion for destruction. (p 155)
Second, I tip my hat to Gray’s pungent turn of phrase. He notes the unfortunate rise in the West of the “antinomian intelligentsia” (p 69) and the “swollen lumpen-intelligentsia” (p 70). These benighted folk (“surplus elites”) “profess to instruct society by deconstructing its institutions and values”(p 69). The anti-Western creed of the antinomian intelligentsia (call it “Woke thinking”, if you wish, adds Gray), “provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity.” (p 110) I note that Gray (p 69) quotes Hobbes’ observation on what might be unkindly described as the “surplus elites” of his day:
The universities have been to the nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans. -- Hobbes, Behemoth, Dialogue 1
The New Leviathans was a pleasure to read, a compact storehouse of political erudition, and a book, as readers may have noticed, eminently quotable. Rex Ahdar is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Otago
The post Nasty and Brutish, Just Somewhat Longer first appeared on Quadrant.

Let the Spraying Begin! – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 17:47:32 +1100

Yep the Spraying of the Plebs has begun in earnest today in Sydney – Mick Raven

The Real X-Files – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 16:04:32 +1100

Sep 19, 2025

COMPILATION: The Dark Alliance: CIA and DARPA’s Hidden War on Citizens The agencies tasked with defending America have a shocking secret history of attacking its own people. DARPA developed Agent Orange that poisoned countless veterans, while the CIA conducted brutal mind control experiments through MK-Ultra, dosing unsuspecting citizens with LSD and worse. From Operation Gladio’s false flag terrorism to domestic surveillance programs targeting activists and journalists, declassified documents reveal decades of government crimes hidden behind national security claims. These operations cost thousands of American lives, yet almost no one faced consequences. The real conspiracy isn’t what they’re hiding – it’s what they’ve already admitted to doing.

Shadow Files…Best Episode of the ‘WHY FILES’ ever – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 16:02:59 +1100

You will believe! – Mick Raven

Oct 4, 2025

The UFO Conspiracy That Took Down JFK June 1947. Harbor patrolman Harold Dahl witnesses six metallic objects over Maury Island, Washington. One drops molten slag onto his boat. A stranger in a black suit arrives the next morning, knowing details Dahl shared with no one. Two military investigators examine the debris. Their plane crashes.

The evidence vanishes. Sixteen years later, witness Fred Crisman surfaces in the JFK assassination investigation. Declassified files reveal he was a CIA disruption agent. On November 12, 1963, Kennedy issues a classified memo demanding UFO disclosure and cooperation with the Soviets. Ten days later, he’s gone. The same operatives who investigated UFOs in 1947 appear connected to Dallas. Guy Banister. Allen Dulles. Fred Crisman. The UFO case might have been a hoax. But what it exposed was real.

CIA origins? – Mick Raven

Conspiracy theory

The term “conspiracy theory” is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which posits that the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule.

In his 2013 book Conspiracy Theory in America, the political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith wrote that the term entered everyday language in the United States after 1964, the year in which the Warren Commission published its findings on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with The New York Times running five stories that year using the term.

A Wise and Suffering Soul

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:59:27 +1100

Life, Science and Art: Leaves from the Pages of Ernest Hello Translated from the French by E.M. Walker Introduced and edited by Gary Furnell The Philosophical Notes series No. 4 Connor Court, 2025, 112 pages, $24.95
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]his little book is the fourth in a series titled Philosophical Notes, all from the hand of the same editor, Gary Furnell, who also provides it with a short introduction and some footnotes. The core of the book is a collection of thirty-one short essays (perhaps meditations would be a better word) on various aspects of the human condition, by French journalist Ernest Hello (1828–1885). There is also a brief note from the translator, E.M. Walker. It is difficult to review a book as diverse in content as this one: an abbreviated list of topics makes that plain. “Art”, “Hope”, “The Friends of Job”, “History”, “Science”, “Indifference” are just a few titles. We shall come to a greater appreciation of the book by first examining Hello’s life. He trained as a lawyer, but never practised, becoming quickly disillusioned by what he saw as the law’s amorality: the willingness of lawyers to defend unworthy or even indefensible acts, without apparent regard to truth, seems to have disgusted him. So he turned to journalism instead, a decision that may reflect his high principles, though to be fair it may also disclose a mind that struggled to deal with nuance. Journalists are more at home with black and white than with grey. His life was deeply scarred by ill health and racking pain from which his strong Catholic faith gave him occasional relief, if not always: “Lord, I cannot carry Thy Cross,” he cried, “except in the sunshine.” He appears to have borne an invalid’s characteristic dissatisfaction with the times in which he lived. There can have been little joy in such a life apart from the pleasures of the mind and the soul in contemplation of truths and beauties that lie beyond the mundane. Hello’s warm and loving heart is, as it were, mellowed by pain, yet it glows serenely throughout his writing. What are his strengths? A firm and well-argued commitment to the notion that Art and Truth are closely bound together, and that both stem from God himself, is his greatest. He is not a man to see art in ugliness, or truth in deceit: “Without Christianity everything will fall to pieces and we shall perish.” There is a mystical quality about some of his writing, most strikingly in the chapter “The Sphinx”. The Sphinx stands for uncertainty and guesswork, necessary conditions in human lives that are dependent on faith, hope and love. “This is the secret:” says he, “to guess is to love.” Absolute certainty is yet to come; here we live by taking chances and by trust. And his weaknesses? One is a kind of hidebound prejudice for which limited life experiences and ill health go far to excuse him. His opinion of non-Catholics has little to commend it:
Catholicism, because it has sacrificed no dogma, has been able to rear, maintain and propagate that chosen race of men which carries morality to the height of sanctity; while Protestantism, though for ever talking of morality, has no Saints.
Equally questionable, to this reviewer’s mind, is: “the Greeks and Roman narrated their histories, but they did not write History. History supposes the universality of human relations.” This apparently cavalier dismissal of the extraordinary pioneering achievements of Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus can probably be explained by the circumstance that the works of the ancient historians offer no meta-narrative of a kind that Hello would have welcomed. The long history of Christian historical writing always sees Christ as both the focal point and the end of all human activity. It is likely that works such as Ernest Renan’s naturalistic The Life of Jesus (1863) dominated his thinking. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]urnell has discovered and offered for public examination the thoughts of a writer who seems to have attracted very little attention since his death 140 years ago. Even more enthusiastically than Furnell, however, the translator E.M. Walker argues for the profound value of Hello’s work, claiming that Hello “has come into his own, and his fellow-countrymen are reading his works with renewed interest and appreciation”. The fact that he wrote this over 100 years ago, in 1912, might be taken to underscore the need for this new edition. Walker writes also that it is “not possible to render in a translation the force and beauty of much of Hello’s prose; but even in the medium of another language his message has its value”. The sad truth is that a translation is never a primary source, but only ever a secondary one. Its value may be further diminished by time, the predisposition of the translator rendered fuzzier by those slight semantic shifts, often minor in themselves, that can occasionally give us the sense that we are reading through a filter or a cracked lens. But for all that Furnell has boldly tried to rescue a courageous, kindly and loving soul from the oblivion of time. I wish his own introduction had been longer and more fulsome (Walker’s enthusiasm for his subject seems to me to exceed Furnell’s), and his footnotes are few. I would have preferred more commentary in the form of footnotes, but appreciate that the editor’s intention may have been to let the author (and his translator) speak for themselves. Two Latin quotations contain typos and one other has been mistranslated. The book ends abruptly, without an index and with no end papers. Unfortunately the page layout is poorly balanced and the cover design rather unimaginative—features too often found, nowadays, in Connor Court’s publications. Nevertheless, even with the defects noted, this little book gives us ready access to the thoughts of a wise and suffering soul whose endurance in the grey areas of chronic ill health, from which most of us (thank God) have been spared are inspirational. Hello lived in a place and time best remembered as the heyday of Impressionist art. His near contemporaries are highly secular painters such as Degas, Monet, Renoir and even Toulouse-Lautrec. What a contrast! I recommend this small and accessible introduction to the life and thought of a very different sort of man, one who reveals another side to the soul of France. David Daintree recently retired as Director of the Hobart-based Christopher Dawson Centre, which was founded to promote wider recognition of the unique achievements of the Christian intellectual tradition. He has a Substack page https://substack.com/@daviddaintree.
The post A Wise and Suffering Soul first appeared on Quadrant.

Come on, Donald, Give War a Chance

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:35:36 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]n The Consolation of Philosophy, written by Anicius Boethius in AD 524 when facing a gruesome execution, evil or the bad is described as a tear in the fabric of the God-made good. Without the good, the bad cannot exist. I don’t believe that Boethius was prescient enough to be thinking of Donald J. Trump at the time. But I was when I read it; at least on reflection. Trump almost entirely does good things. Inevitably there is the odd flaw, akin to the aforementioned tear. Most prominently among the tears is his lust for peace, when peace is simply not available. Trump is magnificent when smashing the illegal immigration racket, when monstering the climate hoax and, its flunky, the renewable-energy scam, when deregulating, when lowering taxes, when protecting US industry from the rampant mercantilism of China and others, when admonishing the parasitical Europeans and the useless United Nations, when de-woking the military, when fighting for the restoration of Judeo-Christian values and, to boot, when exhibiting that increasingly rare commodity; namely, common sense. He is the giant of our times. He even puts Reagan and Thatcher in the shade. Only Churchill can compare. But, casting a shadow on his halo, is his obvious aspiration to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Now that, I am sorry to say, is a onanism. “If your mind is fashioned after better things, there is no need of a judge to award a prize; you have added yourself to the number of the more excellent,” advised Boethius. Lasting peace comes about only when the issues underlying warfare have been resolved. Yet Trump often gives the impression that cracking heads together by the force of his personality will do the job. It won’t. He claims already to have stopped seven wars. Hyperbole in pursuit of the Prize, comes to mind. Let me leave aside the so-named “12-day war” between Israel and Iran, which I will come back to, and focus on the other six. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he combatants in six are as follows: Pakistan / India, Rwanda / DR Congo, Thailand / Cambodia, Armenia / Azerbaijan, Egypt / Ethiopia, and Serbia / Kosovo. A first thing to say is that these were confined conflicts or threats of conflicts not wars. And when you look at the combatants it is hard to imagine peace breaking out lastingly. So far as I know, the underlying causes of the conflicts have not been resolved. This brings me back to the Israeli-Iran war, which hardly lived up to the name either. Trump ended the war immediately after dropping bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear plants. This was premature. It did not allow Israel to finish the job and almost certainly trigger regime change. I previously covered it here. Regime change in Iran is the only pathway to a lasting peace. Trump’s peace is temporary. This is what he said after ending the war on his way to Air Force One: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.” This is not his finest remark. First, it puts Israel and Iran on the same moral level. Second, it is mistaken. Both parties to the conflict know exactly what they are about. One wants to annihilate the other. The other wants to prevent itself from being annihilated. The current so-called peace between the two simply puts the annihilation game on hold. Sometimes peace only comes about through winning a war. It was no accident that the Colt six-shooter handgun was known as the Peacemaker in the old wild west. Peace often only came when someone was shot cold stone dead. Making peace with an intact Wehrmacht or the Imperial Japanese Army was inconceivable. Making a peace deal between Israel and the Mullahs and their revolutionary guards should be thought of as equally inconceivable. And this applies in spades to Hamas as it does to Fatah, which is equally incapable of recognising the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel. And, LOL, with Jerusalem as its capital? Really! Peace with either is illusionary. Quite simply they cannot be bargained with. Thus the 20-point Gaza Peace Plan is a bandage on a malignant sore. I know the great and good have got behind it. Can Albanese, Macron, Starmer, Carney, Ursula von der Leyen, et al, be wrong? Israel Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party) thinks so. Probably Netanyahu too, but he is between a rock and hard place. Take point 6 of the Plan; one of its key provisions amid much operational and administrative bells and whistles.
Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.
Take a punt and assume that Hamas signs up to the Plan. This will be taqiyya writ large. There is no possibility of Hamas genuinely committing to live peacefully with the Jewish State of Israel. Nor, for that matter, would any Palestinian political entity whose leadership wants to survive. From the river to the sea is not an empty slogan. If they are completely defanged in Gaza - a remote possibility -- Hamas will shift their operations to the West Bank, to Syria, to Lebanon, to Egypt. And it is delusional to assume for a minute that those Arab countries which Trump claims have agreed to the Plan, including Hamas-hosting Quatar, have switched sides. The Plan snatches appeasement from the jaws of victory. It gives amnesty to war criminals, and includes (point 5) Israel releasing 250 terrorists convicted of murdering Israelis plus 1700 Gazans detained after October 7. All free to do their worst yet again. What spoils of victory is this? Reportedly, Trump warned that if Hamas doesn’t also accept the Peace Plan, “Israel would have [his] full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas.” That would be a much better basis for any kind of lasting peace. The “temporary” International Stabilisation Force (ISF) and the “vetted” Palestinian police force which it will train and support (point 15), would be much less likely to be picked off by Hamas operatives. Namely, those who had previously agreed to lay down their arms but, quelle surprise, had lied and cached them away. The very same terrorists who have a visceral hatred of turncoats. In other words, the operational and administrative elements of the Plan would have a better chance of working if Israel finished the job and kept the IDF in Gaza for a lengthy time in order to protect the protectors; i.e., the ISF and its Palestinian police force, rather than withdraw in accordance with points 3 and 16. Trump’s instincts, usually so good, go awry when it comes to war and peace. His flip-flopping on the Ukraine/Russia war being a case in point. As another example, why say that he would prevent Israel from annexing the West Bank. Why not say that it is a hypothetical question which he would address if it ever became the policy of the Israeli government. This what God said to the Israelites:
I will set your borders from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates. --NSRV, Exodus 23:31)
This more than covers the West Bank. What God has promised even Trump should avoid dismissing out of hand. And this isn’t simply an esoteric biblical matter. It is taken seriously and literally by many of those in Israel on the so-called religious right. (And by me, incidentally.) More often than not, it is best to say nothing when you don’t understand what is in play. I doubt that Trump is familiar with Exodus. That’s fine. Just keep schtum. Annexing the West Bank would create all kinds of problems for Israel. So it is unlikely that God’s promise will be fulfilled in this generation. So Trump was unnecessarily and provocatively in downing a straw man. The more he jaw-jaws on wars, the bigger the tear seems to become.
The post Come on, Donald, Give War a Chance first appeared on Quadrant.

Knitting for Men

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 17:18:08 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]E[/fusion_dropcap]ach evening, after the supper dishes were cleared from the kitchen table and all the chores completed, the three Guthrie women took up their needles and knitted until it was time to turn in. Widowed, Mrs Guthrie was adamant that she and her girls would knit for King and Country. With no menfolk in the family, it was the least they could do, she reiterated regularly. With trench foot rife at the Western Front, the thought of Australian men losing their feet horrified her and made her even more determined to keep on knitting. Mrs Guthrie was a superb knitter, fast and neat. No pattern could stump her. The click of her needles was rhythmical, alternating over the tick-tock of the clock that sat in the centre of the kitchen dresser. Her elder daughter, Margaret, took after her mother with her knitting prowess. As with most things in her life, Margaret went about her knitting with an air of propriety. She was a school teacher, which carried over into home life. The younger daughter, Matilda, a shop girl, didn’t often get much of a look in. Matilda was not a natural knitter. She was a bit clumsy, and the wool did not glide over the needles as it did for the others at the table. She was forever miscounting stitches, unravelling her knitting, correcting her mistakes, and then knitting on. The dim light of the kitchen would hurt her eyes as night took hold, and she willed it to be bedtime. The Guthries knitted socks. Other women, and some school children, knitted vests or knee-pads or balaclavas, but the Guthries stuck with socks. They made pair after pair of grey socks and put them into the willow basket until they had enough to send off. Sometimes Mrs Guthrie would source khaki wool, but more often than not it was grey. A dull grey. The wool came in hanks, and once a fortnight the Guthries would spend the evening at their neighbour’s house winding the hanks into balls. The outstretched concertina arms of Mrs O’Neill’s wool winder would turn around and around as the women wound the wool into balls. Actually it was Matilda who did most of the winding, with Margaret offering advice. The older women would catch up with news over a cuppa. The sock pattern was a set one. Three needles had to be used and there were to be no back seams. Matilda had to follow the pattern closely, as she hadn’t been able to master it off by heart. Each row felt as if it was different, although it wasn’t, as Margaret kept telling her in her school-teachery sing-song voice. Turning the heel was the trickiest bit and a real faff if you made a mistake. Given the number of Australian men fighting the war, socks were in great demand and stories relating to socks often made it into the newspapers. If Margaret saw something about socks in the newspaper at school, she would clip it out when everyone had finished reading it and bring it home to read that evening while the three women knitted. Mostly, the newspaper pieces were expressions of gratitude for all the socks, and other garments, being knitted across Australia. Other times there were not-so-subtle reminders to knitters about not cheating and making socks with a back seam. Such knitters were called “rogue knitters”. Some knitters were found not to be using the recommended three-needle method. Others weren’t using the splicing method to join wool onto a new ball. Matilda dropped her head at this point, and with downcast eyes kept on knitting. Only the night before, when her mother and sister were momentarily out of the room, she had tied a knot in her wool to join it on to the new ball. Hopefully she wouldn’t be caught out, for as Margaret said, there were standards. Just think, if our boys dropped their standards where would we be! One night Margaret read a piece aloud from the Adelaide Critic. There were the usual pleas for more socks and how quickly a batch had arrived at a desert outpost: only thirty-one days to get there. The paper noted how every soldier in the trenches needed at least one spare pair of dry socks to avoid the dreaded trench foot. And then there was a mention about how soldiers liked to have a little note hidden inside their socks wishing them all the best and thanks for fighting for King and Country, with the knitter’s name and address on it to personalise the message. Matilda didn’t think anything of this, and anyway she had just realised that she had the wrong number of stitches on one of her needles again. A few days later, the Guthries’ latest ten pairs of socks were ready to be parcelled up and delivered to the Comforts Fund depot. Margaret volunteered to wrap them in newspaper with string and deliver them after school the next day. As Matilda was coming in from the yard, she saw through the back window Margaret take a folded-up piece of paper from her pinny pocket and quickly slide it deep inside one of the immaculate pairs of socks she had knitted. The war was relentless. It went on and on. Young men they knew of died, and neighbours often came in with sad news about their sons or those of other neighbours and relatives. The Guthries kept on knitting. It was the least they could do. Matilda surprised herself by getting better at knitting, and by the last months of the war she had learnt the pattern from the sock book almost off by heart. She even contemplated knitting something colourful for herself when the war was over. Maybe a red cardigan, or a lemon-coloured hat. It gave her something to daydream about. But in the meantime, the war raged on, and socks were still in huge demand. When the war finally ended, Matilda spent some of her savings on lemon-coloured wool to knit a hat. She needed help with the pattern, but having to listen to Margaret’s condescending manner didn’t faze her, as it was something different from grey socks. Matilda never wanted to knit another heel as long as she lived. She also had her eye on a cardigan pattern, but that would have to wait until she had saved enough for the red wool. The winter of 1919 came early and with a vengeance. It was perfect knitting weather. Mrs Guthrie had left Margaret and Matilda to look after themselves for a few weeks so she could go and care for an elderly sick aunt in Melbourne. Margaret was kept busy at school. She had been promoted to teaching the older children that year and her work had increased, as she kept telling people, meaning she would often walk in the door the minute Matilda had got the dinner ready. Matilda’s life had altered little since the end of the war, apart from having no more socks to knit. She was quite enjoying the freedom of the evenings now, tired after standing all day in the shop, and was happy to knit at her ease, given it was not socks. One evening, Matilda was just home from the shop. She had changed out of her uniform, although she kept on the lemon-coloured hat she had just finished knitting, as the house was cold after being empty all day. Just as she was trying to light the obstinate coal range in the kitchen, there was a loud knock at the front door. Matilda thought it would be a neighbour wanting to borrow something or other. When she opened the door, she was speechless. A tall, handsome young man in uniform tipped his hat to her and said hello. He unfolded a small piece of paper that looked soft from being folded and refolded many times. He looked at Matilda and said, “I like your hat. You must be the wonderful sock knitter, Miss M. Guthrie.” “I am,” said Matilda. Dr Penelope Jackson MNZM is an art historian and curator. An Adjunct Research Associate at Charles Sturt University, she has published three books on art crime, as well as a book of short stories.
The post Knitting for Men first appeared on Quadrant.

Of Cane Toads and Mortgages

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 11:40:05 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]Y[/fusion_dropcap]ou know you’re in Australia when cane toads and house prices somehow end up in the same conversation. Both started small, both multiplied wildly, and both now hop about ruining perfectly good lawns while nobody quite remembers who thought they were a good idea in the first place. The cane toads were unleashed in Queensland back in the 1930s to solve a beetle problem. They didn’t eat the beetles. They ate everything else instead and then looked pretty happy about it. Which, coincidentally, is more or less what house prices have done since about 1995. So when Anthony Albanese assures us that letting first-home buyers get in with a five per cent deposit will have “minimal impact” on prices, it’s a bit like promising your backyard won’t be too overrun if you invite just a handful of cane toads for a sleepover. Sure, Anthony. Pull the other one, it’s got a rental-inspection notice attached. Let’s call a spade a spade, a 95 per cent mortgage is not a home loan. It’s a cane toad in a tie, pretending to be house-trained. You can carry it around in a shoebox and tell your parents it’s an “investment”, but sooner or later it will sit on your chest in the middle of the night croaking “interest rate rise” until you cry. The government insists this is “helping” young Australians. Which is very sweet, in the same way my Irish aunt used to “help” me by putting three different shades of lipstick on me before the Year 10 formal. Technically helpful. Socially catastrophic. On one side, you have Albo saying, “It’ll be fine. Treasury says only a slight increase in prices.” On the other, you’ve got RBA Governor Michele Bullock with the facial expression of a woman watching a toddler hand a cane toad a Red Bull. Her vibe is that this won’t end well. But she's not diving in to stop it either. When pressed, she basically said: “Look, I wouldn’t expect much improvement for two years.” Translation: the toads are already in the loungeroom, wearing slippers, and applying for citizenship. Housing policy or amphibian experiment? What fascinates me is how governments talk about housing policy as though it’s cutting-edge science. “We’ll drop the deposit to five per cent! We’ll fast-track construction approvals! We’ll incentivise states with three billion dollars!” [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]M[/fusion_dropcap]eanwhile, the actual Australian Bureau of Statistics data reveals approvals are still slumping like a cane toad at a Bunnings sausage sizzle. Which is to say that the numbers are down, the snags are gone, and everyone’s left wondering why they came. It’s the political equivalent of introducing a biological weapon to the environment and then giving a press conference about the full suite of policies while the toads hop cheerfully past your shoes. The Real Croak What Albo and Clare O’Neil won’t admit out loud is this: if under 35 your best shot at affordable housing is still dating someone’s nanna in Mosman. Or buying in a suburb where the streetlights are optional extras. And while the government points to, “more than 500,000 dwellings built” and “three per cent year-on-year increases in construction,” the reality is that most of us are still flat out finding a rental that doesn’t come with a resident possum who pays no rent but hosts midnight tap-dancing rehearsals in the ceiling. So where does that leave us? Exactly where we’ve always been -- ankle-deep in amphibians and mortgage stress, nodding along politely while the PM swears the toads are “manageable.” One day, historians will look back at this era and say, “They introduced a deposit scheme to tame house prices, in the same way they introduced cane toads to tame beetles.” Then they’ll close their laptops, sigh, and go outside to check if their mortgage has grown legs and hopped away.
The post Of Cane Toads and Mortgages first appeared on Quadrant.

PFAS… Blood Levels Rising? – ConspiracyOz

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:45:34 +1000

Timeline – Mick Raven

PFAS Blue Mountains – Class Action Investigation – William Roberts Lawyers Sept 2025

PFAS monitoring results 15th Sept 2025

Sydney Water failed to properly test ‘no known Pfas hotspots’ in catchments 11th Sept 2025

New Global PFAS Regulations_ How to Remain Compliant in 2025 Aug 27, 2025

2024_25_ Cascade Water Filtration Plant

Blue Mountains – WaterNSW June 2025

STOP PFAS Blue Mountains 5th May 2025

Blue Mountains residents to launch class action over PFAS contamination 7th Mar 2025

PFAS blood results cause concern as Blue Mountains residents push for testing 13th Feb 2025

Forever chemicals to be filtered from Blue Mountains drinking water 5th Dec 2024

New mobile treatment system to remove PFAS from drinking water 3rd Dec 2024

Escalatorgate! Sabotage? – ConspiracyOz

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:10:14 +1000

Really? – Mick Raven

Escalatorgate_ Trump alleges ‘triple sabotage’ after technical mishaps at UN 25 Sep 2025

Donald Trump alleged “triple sabotage” at the United Nations, after the US president was plagued by a series of unfortunate events surrounding his address to the global body.

Read More…

Sabotage Or Accident? Trump Furious Over 3 Mishaps At The United Nations 25 Sep 2025

US President Donald Trump has claimed that a series of mishaps during his visit to the United Nations were not mere technical glitches but deliberate acts of sabotage. Trump pointed to three separate incidents: an escalator carrying him and Melania suddenly stopping, a teleprompter going dark mid-speech, and the sound system malfunctioning in the auditorium.

Calling it “not one, not two, but three very sinister events,” Trump has demanded an investigation, with the Secret Service now involved. While the UN suggested the escalator stoppage was triggered accidentally by a member of Trump’s own delegation, the White House dismissed this explanation as “unacceptable,” keeping conspiracy claims alive.

The Speech and Nothing but the Speech – ConspiracyOz

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:03:56 +1000

No Comment – Mick Raven

Dementia revealed as new leading cause of death in Australia

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Dementia is now the leading cause of death in our country, according to the latest report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).

A quarter of Australian kids are lacking adequate communication skills

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
One in four Australian children aren't adequately prepared with basic communication skills by the time they start schooling, new figures have revealed.

Albanese government plans to phase out petrol and diesel

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Canola oil and other “low carbon liquid fuels” may eventually replace petrol and diesel in Australia, as the Albanese government looks to transition our country to a ‘cleaner future’ via a $1.1 billion investment.

AI Made a Movie About Its Own Future

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:49:05 +1000

AIFLIX next? – Mick Raven

This video was supported by the Future of Life Institute’s Digital Media Accelerator: https://futureoflife.org/project/digi…

This video is probably the hardest on I’ve worked on. It took me a month of full time work, plus I got a lot of help from a friend with the editing. It took a lot more work than my usual video, ironically enough.

These were the AI tools used in the making of this video:

Main character’s video and audio – HeyGen + ElevenLabs B-roll video – Veo 3 (thank you Google Deepmind for free access #giftfromgoogle)

Other characters talking – Veo 3 (and sometimes ElevenLabs as well)

Scripting – Claude 4 Sonnet/ Opus Character design and frames – Flux Kontext in OpenArt Agent 3 and 4 design and stills etc – ChatGPT o3 image model + Canva Thumbnail – ChatGPT o3

Congressional hearing into weather modification held in the U.S

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
A congressional subcommittee in the U.S has spent nearly two hours discussing the science and implications of weather modification and geoengineering.

Vigils for Charlie Kirk held across Australia | Media

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and other locations have all held vigils for slain U.S political commentator, Charlie Kirk.

Kirk Assassination: More Questions Emerge

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
The official story of the Charlie Kirk assassination continues to raise eyebrows, as more information is revealed as the days go on.

Massive turn out for “Unite the Kingdom” demonstration in London

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Huge numbers of protesters have marched through central London, carrying flags of England and Britain in one of the biggest demonstrations in U.K history.

AI 2027

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:07:54 +1000

AI 2027

Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean

https://ai-2027.com/

April 3rd 2025

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.

We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames,

expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.²

The CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have all predicted that AGI will arrive within the next 5 years.

Sam Altman has said OpenAI is setting its sights on “superintelligence in the true sense of the word” and the “glorious future.”³

What might that look like? We wrote AI 2027 to answer that question. Claims about the future are often frustratingly vague,

so we tried to be as concrete and quantitative as possible, even though this means depicting one of many possible futures.

We wrote two endings: a “slowdown” and a “race” ending. However, AI 2027 is not a recommendation or exhortation.

Our goal is predictive accuracy.⁴

We encourage you to debate and counter this scenario.⁵ We hope to spark a broad conversation about where we’re headed and how to steer toward positive futures.

We’re planning to give out thousands in prizes to the best alternative scenarios.

Our research on key questions (e.g. what goals will future AI agents have?) can be found here.

The scenario itself was written iteratively: we wrote the first period (up to mid-2025), then the following period, etc. until we reached the ending.

We then scrapped this and did it again.

We weren’t trying to reach any particular ending. After we finished the first ending—which is now colored red

—we wrote a new alternative branch because we wanted to also depict a more hopeful way things could end,

starting from roughly the same premises. This went through several iterations.⁶

Our scenario was informed by approximately 25 tabletop exercises and feedback from over 100 people,

including dozens of experts in each of AI governance and AI technical work.

“I highly recommend reading this scenario-type prediction on how AI could transform the world in just a few years.

Nobody has a crystal ball, but this type of content can help notice important questions and illustrate the potential impact of emerging risks.” —Yoshua Bengio⁷

We have set ourselves an impossible task. Trying to predict how superhuman AI in 2027 would go is like trying to predict how World War 3 in 2027 would go,

except that it’s an even larger departure from past case studies. Yet it is still valuable to attempt, just as it is valuable for the U.S. military to game out Taiwan scenarios.

Painting the whole picture makes us notice important questions or connections we hadn’t considered or appreciated before,

or realize that a possibility is more or less likely. Moreover, by sticking our necks out with concrete predictions,

and encouraging others to publicly state their disagreements, we make it possible to evaluate years later who was right.

Also, one author wrote a lower-effort AI scenario before, in August 2021. While it got many things wrong, overall it was surprisingly successful:

he predicted the rise of chain-of-thought, inference scaling, sweeping AI chip export controls, and $100 million training runs—all more than a year before ChatGPT.

Daniel Kokotajlo (TIME100, NYT piece) is a former OpenAI researcher whose previous AI predictions have held up well.

Eli Lifland co-founded AI Digest, did AI robustness research, and ranks #1 on the RAND Forecasting Initiative all-time leaderboard.

Thomas Larsen founded the Center for AI Policy and did AI safety research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Romeo Dean is completing a computer science concurrent bachelor’s and master’s degree at Harvard and previously was an AI Policy Fellow at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy.

Scott Alexander, blogger extraordinaire, volunteered to rewrite our content in an engaging style;

the fun parts of the story are his and the boring parts are ours.

For more about our team and acknowledgements, see the About page.

Mid 2025: Stumbling Agents

The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents.

Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”: you can prompt them with tasks like

“order me a burrito on DoorDash” or “open my budget spreadsheet and sum this month’s expenses.”

They will check in with you as needed: for example, to ask you to confirm purchases.⁸

Though more advanced than previous iterations like Operator, they struggle to get widespread usage.⁹

Meanwhile, out of public focus, more specialized coding and research agents are beginning to transform their professions.

The AIs of 2024 could follow specific instructions: they could turn bullet points into emails, and simple requests into working code.

In 2025, AIs function more like employees. Coding AIs increasingly look like autonomous agents rather than mere assistants:

taking instructions via Slack or Teams and making substantial code changes on their own, sometimes saving hours or even days.¹⁰

Research agents spend half an hour scouring the Internet to answer your question.

The agents are impressive in theory (and in cherry-picked examples), but in practice unreliable.

AI twitter is full of stories about tasks bungled in some particularly hilarious way.

The better agents are also expensive; you get what you pay for, and the best performance costs hundreds of dollars a month.¹¹

Still, many companies find ways to fit AI agents into their workflows.¹²

Late 2025: The World’s Most Expensive AI

OpenBrain is building the biggest datacenters the world has ever seen.¹³

(To avoid singling out any one existing company, we’re going to describe a fictional artificial general intelligence company,

which we’ll call OpenBrain. We imagine the others to be 3–9 months behind OpenBrain.)

GPT-3
(3 x 10^23 FLOP)

GPT-4
(2 x 10^25 FLOP)

Agent-1
(4 x 10^27 FLOP)

ai-2027.com

GPT-4 required $2 \cdot 1 0^{25}$ FLOP of compute to train.¹⁴ OpenBrain’s latest public model—Agent-0—was trained with $1 0^{27}$ FLOP.

Once the new datacenters are up and running, they’ll be able to train a model with $1 0^{28}$ FLOP—a thousand times more than GPT-4.¹⁵

Other companies pour money into their own giant datacenters, hoping to keep pace.

Although models are improving on a wide range of skills, one stands out: OpenBrain focuses on AIs that can speed up AI research.

They want to win the twin arms races against China (whose leading company we’ll call “DeepCent”)¹⁶ and their U.S. competitors.

The more of their research and development (R&D) cycle they can automate, the faster they can go. So when OpenBrain finishes training Agent-1,

a new model under internal development, it’s good at many things but great at helping with AI research.¹⁷ By this point “finishes training”

is a bit of a misnomer; models are frequently updated to newer versions trained on additional data or partially re-trained to patch some weaknesses.¹⁸

The same training environments that teach Agent-1 to autonomously code and web-browse also make it a good hacker.

Moreover, it could offer substantial help to terrorists designing bioweapons, thanks to its PhD-level knowledge of every field and ability to browse the web.

OpenBrain reassures the government that the model has been “aligned” so that it will refuse to comply with malicious requests.

Modern AI systems are gigantic artificial neural networks. Early in training, an AI won’t have “goals” so much as “reflexes”:

If it sees “Pleased to meet”, it outputs “ you”. By the time it has been trained to predict approximately one internet’s worth of text,

it’ll have developed sophisticated internal circuitry that encodes vast amounts of knowledge and flexibly role-plays as arbitrary authors,

since that’s what helps it predict text with superhuman accuracy.¹⁹

After being trained to predict internet text, the model is trained to produce text in response to instructions.

This bakes in a basic personality and “drives.”²⁰ For example, an agent that understands a task clearly is more likely to complete it successfully;

over the course of training the model “learns” a “drive” to get a clear understanding of its tasks.

Other drives in this category might be effectiveness, knowledge, and self-presentation (i.e. the tendency to frame its results in the best possible light).²¹

OpenBrain has a model specification (or “Spec”), a written document describing the goals, rules, principles,

etc. that are supposed to guide the model’s behavior.²² Agent-1’s Spec combines a few vague goals (like “assist the user” and “don’t break the law”)

with a long list of more specific dos and don’ts (“don’t say this particular word,” “here’s how to handle this particular situation”).

Using techniques that utilize AIs to train other AIs,²³ the model memorizes the Spec and learns to reason carefully about its maxims.

By the end of this training, the AI will hopefully be helpful (obey instructions), harmless (refuse to help with scams,

bomb-making, and other dangerous activities) and honest (resist the temptation to get better ratings from gullible humans by hallucinating citations²⁴ or faking task completion).

Training process and LLM psychology: why we keep saying “hopefully”

OpenBrain’s

A.I.2027…Very Close – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 14:50:45 +1000

AI2027 Is this how AI might destroy humanity

1,253,942 views Aug 1, 2025 #WorldService #ai #BBCWorldService

A research paper predicting that artificial intelligence will go rogue in 2027 and lead to humanity’s extinction within a decade is making waves in the tech world.

The detailed scenario, called AI2027, was published by a group of influential AI experts in the spring and has since spurred many viral videos as people debate its likelihood.

The BBC has recreated scenes from the scenario using mainstream generative AI tools to illustrate the stark prediction and spoken to experts about the impact the paper is having.

00:00 The AI2027 scenario

00:35 OpenBrain reaches AGI in 2027

02:30 Superintelligence is reached in late 2027

03:51 Mass job losses begin in 2028

04:40 Peace deal averts war in 2029

04:58 Humanity is wiped out in 2035

05:39 Gary Marcus criticises AI2027

06:53 Thomas Larsen on the alternative ending

Hunt Caught Red Handed – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 14:44:30 +1000

Cult of NO Personality? – Mick Raven

Former minister Greg Hunt works for Brethren company whose owners made millions on COVID contracts

Neil Chenoweth, Louise Milligan, Nick Farrow, Briana Fiore and Dylan Welch

https://www.abc.net.au

13 September 2025

Mr Hunt oversaw Australia’s response to COVID-19 in the Morrison government. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

In short:

Greg Hunt works for three companies linked to senior members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church.

While Brethren members campaigning for Liberal candidates has put the group in the spotlight, their networking with senior Liberals has drawn less focus.

Four Corners can confirm that members of the church have been major donors to the Coalition.

Within months of leaving parliament, former health minister Greg Hunt started working for a Plymouth Brethren-linked company whose owners won $135 million in government contracts for COVID supplies.

It was the first of three companies linked to senior Brethren figures in Australia and New Zealand that have engaged Mr Hunt as a board adviser, at a time when the church has fostered closer links to the Liberals.

The Sydney-based church, which has been described by former members and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as a “cult”, is supported by a business empire which includes more than 3,000 companies around the world.

Members of the Plymouth Brethren are restricted from socialising with non-Brethren, women are blocked from almost all leadership positions and those who leave the church are shunned and blocked from speaking with their family.

Brethren members outside a Sydney “meeting hall”. The church has 55,000 members worldwide. (Four Corners: Briana Fiore)

While their campaigning for Liberal candidates at recent elections has put the group in the spotlight, their networking with senior Liberals has drawn less focus.

Hunt the adviser

As health minister in the Morrison government, Mr Hunt oversaw Australia’s strategy and response to the COVID-19 pandemic before leaving parliament in May 2022.

Early the following year he began advisory work for Connected Global, whose owners are close to the family of Bruce Hales, the leader of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church.

Mr Hunt now advises three Brethren-linked companies. (Getty Images: Asanka Ratnayake)

Connected Global’s owners and directors, Gavin and Russell Grace and other Grace family members, also run Westlab, a pathology supply company.

Westlab reported $54.1 million in COVID contracts with the health department while Mr Hunt was health minister.

In the 11 months after Mr Hunt retired from politics in May 2022, the company received another $80.8 million in COVID contracts with the department.

Bruce Hales, who is an accountant as well as being the Brethren’s spiritual leader, acted as an auditor for Westlab. Westlab sourced rapid antigen tests via a company controlled by two of Hales’s sons.

The leader of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, Bruce Hales (standing at microphone). (Supplied)

A spokesman for Mr Hunt said that after an approach in December 2022, the former health minister began working one day a month for Connected Global.

“Mr Hunt had no dealings, meetings, contact or engagement with the companies or individuals you raise while minister nor any decisions relating to them,” the spokesman said.

In regard to COVID-19 contracts “all decisions on procurement were made solely by the Australian public service”, he said. The Australian National Audit Office 2021 reviews “expressly confirmed that procurement was managed exclusively by the APS with no ministerial involvement”.

“Mr Hunt’s advisory roles began well after leaving office and explicitly rule out lobbying. There is therefore no conflict of any form nor could there be.”

Since last year Mr Hunt has spent an additional day a month in total working as board adviser to the Arconn design group in Sydney and Expedite Design in Auckland, both linked to senior Brethren figures.

Donations and volunteering

The Plymouth Brethren are facing fresh scrutiny over their role in the federal election in May, which is expected to be a major focus of a parliamentary inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, chaired by Labor’s Jerome Laxale.

“It felt like an assault on democracy,” Mr Laxale told Four Corners.

“It felt like they were there to buy the election ― the amount of money that was being spent in some seats was extraordinary.

“This is not a standard that Australians want repeated ever again.”

Jerome Laxale says many Brethren members were campaigning for the Liberals in his seat. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

For the first time, Four Corners can confirm that members of the church have been major donors to the Coalition.

Three days before the 2022 federal election, as Brethren volunteers campaigned for Liberal candidates, electoral records show that a South Australian company, Voltex Electrical Associates, donated $115,000 to the Liberal Party.

Two months earlier, Bruce Hales was appointed auditor to the Voltex group. A Hales family member works for Voltex.

The owner of Voltex is involved in the Brethren’s South Australian church.

Brethren members have volunteered on Liberal campaigns despite traditionally being discouraged from voting. File photo (Four Corners)

Despite traditionally being discouraged from voting, at the last election Brethren members were reportedly being brought to seats around the country to volunteer for the Coalition.

During the campaign Anthony Albanese said the involvement of members of the “cult” needed to be explained.

“Where are all these people coming from?” he said.

“They don’t vote, by the way, but they all of a sudden have found this enthusiasm in their hundreds to travel around the country, to hand out how to votes. What’s the quid pro quo there?”

On Monday night Four Corners investigates the secretive, ultra-wealthy organisation whose $22 billion business empire stretches around the globe. Watch on ABC iview.

Mr Laxale says Brethren members descended in droves on his seat of Bennelong.

“It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before,” Mr Laxale said. “The sheer number of people that turned up in a coordinated manner.”

Bruce Hales’s own son Gareth, who lives in Bennelong, was spotted volunteering for the Liberals.

Mr Laxale said he was even aware of Brethren scrutineering votes on behalf of the Liberal Party during the count.

“That tells me that there was coordination at the highest level, to get those forms distributed to individuals, to have the candidate countersign those forms,” Mr Laxale said.

“This doesn’t happen by circumstance.”

Church insiders have given Four Corners the instructions that Brethren members sent to volunteers on how to respond to questions:

What church are you from? I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to ask my religion. I’m volunteering…

Has your church asked you to volunteer…? No… I just love our country and want to help get Australia back on track. My religion has nothing to do with me volunteering.

The Brethren said in a statement that the decision some members made not to vote was supported by the Bible. It said any volunteering Brethren members did for campaigns was a personal decision for them, “not one for the church”.

The church said it was not a “cult” and while it had written to Mr Albanese about his comments, it hadn’t heard back.

‘They’re good people’

Liberal leaders have maintained warm relations with the Brethren since the John Howard era.

Angus Taylor, who narrowly lost the Liberal’s post-election leadership contest to Sussan Ley, recently praised the Brethren’s charity, Rapid Relief Team (RRT), and its support for the “Pollie Pedal” fundraising rides by politicians.

Report finds Sydney Water was too quick to claim no PFAS hotspots in drinking water catchments

Danuta Kozaki

https://www.abc.net.au

110925

High levels of the cancer-linked “forever chemicals” were detected in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. ( ABC News: Mark Leonardi )

In short:

A NSW parliamentary inquiry has found Sydney Water was too quick to say there was no PFAS contamination in the city’s drinking water catchment.

High levels of the cancer-linked ‘forever chemicals’ were detected in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

The head of a Blue Mountains community advocacy group claims Sydney Water failed in its duty of care.

A New South Wales parliamentary inquiry has found Sydney Water was too quick to say there was no PFAS contamination in the city’s drinking water catchment.

The report by an upper house parliamentary select committee found Sydney Water did not perform an “appropriate level of due diligence” before it claimed in June 2024 there were no known PFAS hotspots within its drinking water catchments.

The focus on so-called ‘forever chemicals’ is growing, with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) referring to a family of synthetic chemicals found in all sorts of industrial and cleaning products that remain in the environment.

In August 2024 — mere months following Sydney Water’s PFAs assurances — the cancer-linked chemicals were detected during testing at water filtration plants across Sydney.

The highest levels were detected in the Blue Mountains, west of the city.

As a result, WaterNSW disconnected Medlow Dam as a “precautionary measure” after the tests returned elevated traces of PFAS.

Medlow Dam, which supplies drinking water for thousands of residents, was found to have unacceptable levels of PFAS. (ABC News: Shaun Kingma)

System struggling to ‘keep pace’ with spread of PFAS

The report said the current advice provided by NSW Health on PFAS “requires further scrutiny”.

This included advice on potential associations with certain types of cancer and other diseases and whether individuals exposed to higher levels of PFAS should get their blood tested.

In the report’s foreword, committee chair, Greens MP Cate Faehrmann, said the public should have the “utmost faith” that the relevant government bodies are keeping the state’s drinking water and waterways safe.

“However, as the committee undertook its work it soon became apparent that government agencies tasked with protecting public health and water quality had been unable to keep pace with the spread of PFAS chemicals throughout the environment,” Ms Faehrmann said.

John Dee from the Blue Mountains community advocacy group STOP PFAS said he believed Sydney Water had failed in its duty of care.

“Sydney Water in June 2024 falsely claimed there were no known PFAS hotspots. However, not a single test had been done at that time in the Blue Mountains’ drinking water supply, despite tests being done elsewhere,” Mr Dee said.

“At the end of June 2024, parts of the Blue Mountains’ drinking water tested 300 times higher for PFAS than tap water from Sydney’s Warragamba Dam.”

Jon Dee criticised authorities for leaving his community exposed to dangerous chemicals. (ABC News: Anushri Sood)

Sydney Water was contacted by the ABC for comment.

Renewed calls for free PFAS blood tests

A third finding from the report said the government ought to support the blood testing and medical monitoring of willing individuals within communities affected by elevated levels of PFAS.

Answering your PFAS questions

Denis O’Carroll is working with governments to help better understand and mitigate levels of PFAS in water supplies. (ABC News: Gregory Heap)

As Australians figure out how to live with so-called “forever chemicals”, we’ve asked leading PFAS experts to help us understand the risks.

The report said this testing would aid in early detection of adverse health impacts, inform future healthcare plans and assist in “much-needed research” into the impacts of PFAS exposure.

For Mr Dee, he has repeated his community’s call for free blood testing.

“Results from 27 PFAS blood tests show that some Blue Mountains residents have dangerously high levels. With most residents unable to afford the $500 cost of each test, we hope the inquiry’s findings will finally push the Minns government to provide free testing for the Blue Mountains community,” he said.

Mr Dee said the STOP PFAS group were threatening to take legal action if the government did not subsidise testing.

The state government is expected to supply its response to the report’s findings and recommendations by the end of the year.

“We will consider the report and thank the committee for their work, and community members for taking the time to share their views and expertise,” a NSW government spokesperson said.

“We recognise there is community concern about PFAS levels in water, and we are committed to continuously improving our approach in line with national guidelines and the latest evidence.”

More links to this Article – Mick Raven

New Jersey Lands $2B PFAS Settlement From DuPont – While Water Systems’ Settlements Roll In

3M PFAS_ the toxic trail of destruction left by a corporate giant

PFAS experts answer common questions about ‘forever chemicals’ and the risks to human health

Reverse osmosis water filter cost

We Have Lift-Off Ppl – ConspiracyOz

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:48:15 +1000

Uppity Up goes Gold Ppl – Mick Raven

https://abcbullion.com.au

Its only just begun! – Mick Raven

Gold price surges to all-time highs as global investors seek ‘safe haven’ and don’t find it in US dollar 10th Sept 2025

Mint condition_ the price of gold has hit a record high 9th Sept 2025

How much higher can gold rise_ One investment bank says $5,000 is a real possibility 8th Sept 2025

Gold price hits record high as investors seek safety 3rd Sept 2025

Florida to ban all vaccine mandates, including for children

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Florida's Surgeon General has announced the U.S state plans to end all vaccine mandates, including those required for school entry, likening mandates to "slavery".

Conquering Gaza – ConspiracyOz

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 20:10:46 +1000

There are ‘millions’ of us waiting to come…ugh! (comment to me years ago by an immigrant) – Mick Raven

Benjamin Netanyahu’s office says Israel will take control of Gaza City.

Gazan university students restart their lives in Australia with support to study in Western Sydney

Hamas-Israel Conflict_ Visa Support and other assistance

Immigrant Health Service _ Palestinian refugees – key issues

Palestinian Australians – Wikipedia

Australia to recognise Palestinian State _ Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs

Netzarim Corridor – Wikipedia

Thousands March for Humanity – Amnesty International Australia

Netanyahu reportedly leaning towards total occupation of Gaza

The Legal Status of the West Bank and Gaza – Question of Palestine

Netanyahu ‘set to order full occupation of Gaza‘

Israel’s war in Gaza faces difficult path forward after release of hostage videos

Gaza Gas_ Still Under Water _ MEES

Behind Israel’s ‘end game’ for Gaza_ Theft of offshore gas reserves – Workers World

Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Palaeontology _ Offshore Gaza_ gas in deep-water sedimentary reservoir

Australian, Israeli politicians react to Sydney Harbour Bridge pro-Palestinian protest

Pro-Palestinian protesters cross Sydney Harbour Bridge

Gaza Humanitarian Foundation closes all aid distribution sites after shootings

The Men fit and healthy and the families starving …mmm I wonder whats going on here? – Mick Raven

‘We faced hunger before, but never like this’_ skeletal children fill hospital wards as starvation grips Gaza

Children in Gaza need life-saving support _ UNICEF

Death toll from starvation in Gaza rises to 115 as Israeli attacks continue _ Israel-Palestine conflict News _ Al Jazeera

Desperate Palestinians overrun controversial food distribution centre in Gaza

Gaza Strip famine – Wikipedia

Gaza suffering ‘major catastrophe’ as deaths from starvation spike

Gaza warehouse broken into by ‘hordes of hungry people‘ says WFP

Gaza_ 57 children reported dead from malnutrition, says WHO

Statement by UNICEF unconscionable deaths of children by starvation in the Gaza Strip

‘They’re losing hope’_ What doctors, aid workers are seeing in Gaza amid hunger crisis

March for Pales..tine Whoops They Mean Australia? – ConspiracyOz

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 22:07:05 +1000

Your guess is as good as mine…ugh! – Mick Raven

The New Palistralian Flag

March for Australia rallies_ Thousands of demonstrators descend on capital cities for anti-immigration protests

March for Australia updates_ Minister slams Dezi Freeman sign

March for Australia_ Thousands attend Sydney anti-immigration rally

Tomorrow, some people will gather to express their views.

March for Australia rallies held in cities across the country

Pauline Hanson joins crowds in Canberra as anti-immigration protests heat up

March for Australia_ Anti-immigration protests begin in Australia’s capital cities

‘Right to protest’_ March for Australia rallies against mass migration draw support and controversy

March Australia _ Facebook?

Police Brace For Anti-Immigration Rallies Across Australia

March for Australia_ how are police and government responding to anti-immigration rally promoted by neo-Nazis

Sydneysiders warned of major disruptions on Sunday with three protests, marathon in CBD

Nationwide March for Australia sparks mixed reactions among migrants

March For Australia 31st August protest_ Leaked recording of rally organiser Bec Freedom

March for Australia