Quotulatiousness

July 3, 2026

The latest trend in tourism: “grocery tourism”

Filed under: Australia, Food, Japan, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Freeman, Nicole James discusses being so far ahead of a trend that it’s only just catching up with her now:

“Piggly Wiggly” by afiler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Grocery tourism is the hot trend of 2026 according to Condé Nast Traveler. This is all well and good, but also a bit late to the trolley because I have been practicing this trend since my twenties, although without the benefit of a name or a hashtag.

My two worlds met in the supermarket aisle. Before I was a travel writer and sent to places with hotel beds that appeared to have been prepared for minor royalty or a very clean corpse, I was a checkout chick at supermarket chain Coles. This was when prices were typed in by hand, making me feel like I was conducting a low-level NASA launch procedure.

A tin of pineapple rings would trundle towards me, and I would punch in its code. Behind it would come shampoo, fish fingers, instant pudding, 24 cans of Diet Coke, and a packet of aspirin. From these items, I could deduce entire family systems. Marriage trouble. School excursions. Flu. A birthday party. A woman about to murder everyone in her house unless she got a Mint Slice into herself immediately.

I loved the products. Not necessarily the customers who could turn feral over a five-cent discrepancy in canned tomatoes. The conveyor belt was a pageant of human need. It was anthropology in a polyester apron.

When people now declare that they have discovered grocery store tourism, I feel like saying, “We know. We’ve had those for years.”

My first trip to America should have been my grand supermarket awakening. I was a PR manager for Malaysia Airlines in the late ’90s, and we were launching a very long flight to New York from Sydney via KL and Dubai. I arrived bristling with ambition. I wanted to see the cereal aisle. Long had we heard rumors of American supermarkets. They were great glittering cathedrals of corn syrup with aisles devoted just to cereal and marshmallows in the shapes of everything from the moon and stars to presidents. I wanted to stand before them all in awe, like Moses, if Moses had come down from the mountain carrying Pop-Tarts.

[…]

I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.

Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.

And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.

Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.

South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.

And now, social media has turned all of this into content. Travelers narrate the experience into their phones. A German soccer fan can wander into an American Waffle House at one in the morning and emerge as a folk hero. Erewhon in Los Angeles has become a celebrity shrine where a smoothie can cost more than a small household appliance and one strawberry comes packaged like an engagement ring and with a similar price.

Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.

June 28, 2026

Multiculturalism in Australia: theory and practice

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Australia, like the rest of the Anglosphere (with the notable exception of the United States) has adopted multiculturalism as a secular national religion, yet all is not well Down Under, as Celina illustrates:

Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club address last week has thrust the conversation of multiculturalism back into the centre of Australian politics. With One Nation now the most popular party in the polls, her pledge for a “monoculture” is no longer being pushed into the fringes. Yet, as it stands One Nation doesn’t really have any concrete policy on how to abolish multiculturalism.

Firstly, we must distinguish what is meant by multiculturalism in relation to politics. Multiculturalism is not just the presence of different cultural practices in Australia. That is a deliberate straw-man. “Abolish multiculturalism and you lose your Bah mi or Chinese takeaways” is a lazy reductionism pushed by people who are either stupid or as a sarcastic question from the left about the lack of One Nations ability to provide actual policy.

Multiculturalism, as it operates in Australia, is the institutionalisation of minority ethnic and religious lobbying. It is a system in which governments treat organised ethnic, religious and minority identity-based groups as permanent stakeholders with privileged access to policy-making. These groups receive taxpayer funding, sit on advisory bodies, submit formal recommendations, and see their priorities turned into law on hate speech, anti-discrimination, social cohesion and diversity policy. The broader Australian public is expected to accept the resulting consensus.

The Machinery That Actually Exists

Australia maintains a Minister for Multicultural Affairs, an Office for Multicultural Affairs inside the Department of Home Affairs, an Australian Multicultural Council, and a Ministerial Forum on Multicultural Affairs. States have their own legislation: the Multicultural NSW Act, Victoria’s Multicultural Victoria Act, South Australia’s Multicultural Act, Queensland’s Multicultural Recognition Act and others. They create recurring funding streams, annual reporting obligations, advisory councils and grants programs that sustain an entire ecosystem of peak bodies, settlement providers and advocacy organisations.

Commonwealth multicultural grants run into tens of millions annually. Additional streams exist for “social cohesion”, security upgrades for specific communities and settlement services. Peak bodies such as the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA), the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) and the Hindu Council routinely prepare submissions, appear before inquiries and maintain ongoing relationships with ministers and bureaucrats. Personnel overlap between federal and state advisory structures is visible and recurring.

This is what political scientist Theodore Lowi called “interest group liberalism“.1 Lowi’s insight was that the pluralist system does not represent the public interest but rather rewards whichever organised groups can gain access to the machinery of government. The democratic problem is that the state has granted specific groups a structural position that ordinary, unorganised citizens do not enjoy. This results in something called mobilisation of bias, as coined by E.E. Schattschneider. described this form of power as the “mobilisation of bias“, where “some issues are organised into politics while others are organised out“.2,3

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_group_liberalism
  2. https://www.powercube.net/analyse-power/forms-of-power/hidden-power/
  3. (2011). “Mobilization of bias”. In K. Dowding (Ed.) Encyclopedia of power (pp. 424-424). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412994088.n234

June 25, 2026

QotD: Division of domestic work, 1970s onward

Filed under: Australia, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    The Women’s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from “unpaid domestic servitude at home”.

Again, this is Straight Outta Engels, from 1884. Even back in 1970, we could all yell “Read another book!” Someone ought to rewrite The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State with a few quidditch matches in it; it’d be on the bestseller list until the sun’s a cinder.

    Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.

I find this extremely hard to believe. So I checked their source, which is a very scientific-sounding site called “The Conversation”. You’ll just have to click it for yourself, since I can’t figure out how to screenshot just the little graphic they have, but if you do, you’ll notice a couple things straight off:

First, this data is from Australia. Which is bullshit, because look, y’all, I’ve seen the Mad Max movies, and nobody’s doing any domestic labor in Australia. Their main settlement is ruled by Tina Turner, for fuck’s sake, and the Prime Minister runs around in a thong and a hockey mask. Sweet cars, though, I’ll give them that.

The other thing you’ll notice is that the “Australian Bureau of Statistics” — I’m pretty sure that’s the motorized hang glider guy — has obviously been having fun with the scalar functions in whatever post-apocalyptic version of Excel they’ve got down there. The bars for “did no unpaid domestic work” look dramatic … but they represent a mere seven point difference. (And do you see what I mean? Apparently 29% of Australian men, and 22% of Australian women, do no unpaid domestic labor whatsoever. By my math, that’s a quarter of the country stewing in its own filth. I know, I know … I’m amazed it’s that low).

The bars for “5-14 hours”, though, show a fractional difference: Women do a whopping 0.3% more. And again, this is Australia, but even if we assume that “unpaid domestic labor” is stuff like “wiping the blood from the somehow intact windshield of the last of the V-8 interceptors”, 5-14 hours is what you might call “the outer limits of normal for a working stiff”. Admittedly I live in a two-bedroom apartment, not a house, but I’m a bit of a neat freak, and “an hour a day” is about all I do. Vacuum the floors and scrub the toilets on Sunday, that’s two hours tops. I’ll be generous and say I spend another 3-4 doing the squeegee thing to my shower walls after I bathe, and loading the dishes in the washer, and giving the counters a quick wipedown once or twice a week, etc.

The real difference comes in the “15-29 hours” and “30 hours or more” categories, and you have to be very, very Smart indeed to find that “problematic”, since those are stay-at-home moms. In other words, they do that “unpaid domestic labor” by choice. Because “the care and feeding of the next generation”, not to mention “the deep, primal satisfaction one gets from seeing a little life grow that you helped create” don’t really count as pay.

    Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?

Gosh, that IS a problem! And as the Australians have shown us, the answer seems to be “just stew in your own filth”. It’s a solution America’s single gals, at least, seem to have embraced with kamikaze-level enthusiasm. Back in the days, I’d always insist on taking a girl back to my place, because condoms don’t cover the entire body and her place was always, and I do mean always, a certifiable biohazard. I’d rather do a striptease in Chernobyl’s reactor core than do anything in an American woman’s bedroom, and their bathrooms are pits of unspeakable Lovecraftian horror.

Severian, “SJWs Always Project”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-08.

May 16, 2026

Indonesian M95/51 Mannlicher Carbine & Short Rifle Converted to .303 British

Filed under: Asia, Australia, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Dec 2025

When Indonesia won its independence in 1949, its military had a real mess of different equipment. The SMLE was adopted as the first standard rifle, but these were in short supply and a lot of Arisakas and Dutch Mannlichers were also in the country’s possession. Looking for a weapon for rural police using the now-standard .303 British cartridge, the Indonesian government decided to revisit a program to convert 6.5mm M95 rifles and carbines to .303 — something initially done with Australian help in 1941.

With Australian advisors from Lithgow, the Indonesian PSM factory gear conversions in 1951, and continued them into early 1955. In total, 13,999 M95/51 conversions were made, 9,904 of them carbines and 4,905 short rifles. They were made by reboring the original 6.5mm barrels to .303 and reaming the chambers out (although this does result in a slight double shoulder to fired cases). The carbines (with 19″ barrels) were fitted with a variety of muzzle brakes, and made for an as-yet unidentified pattern of bayonet. The short rifles (with 26″ barrels) were given new 2-position rear notch sights, but left using standard Dutch M95 bayonets.

The guns were used in police and possibly military training roles until removed from service in 1961. A batch was sold as surplus in 1962 to InterArms, and another batch was found in the late 1970s and sold to Odin in the early 1980s. The InterArms guns tend to be in better condition, and have intact Indonesian markings, where the Odin guns are generally rougher and have the government property marks ground off.
(more…)

May 12, 2026

First One Nation party MP elected in Australian by-election

Filed under: Australia, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

After the surge in support for populist Reform Party candidates in the British local elections, Australia’s populist One Nation party achieved their first member of the House of Representatives in a by-election in Farrer, with David Farley receiving 57% of the votes:

Australia’s One Nation party has won its first lower-house seat in a moment that’s been described as a political earthquake. As with Reform’s success in the council elections here, its significance is already being argued over.

The fact remains that One Nation candidate David Farley won over 57 per cent of the tally in Farrer, a vast regional constituency in New South Wales, a weathervane election that was triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley after she was ousted as leader of the opposition conservative Liberal Party.

Saturday’s poll was the first federal test of One Nation’s support after the party recorded the second-highest number of votes out of any political party in the South Australian state election in March and, importantly, since the change of leadership of the Liberal Coalition opposition. With it, as I predicted a week or two ago, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party broke through Australia’s political glass ceiling.

Why and how? Well, for one significant reason. In response to her rise in the Australian polls, for the first time Ms Hanson and her party were endorsed by the opposition Liberal and Country (National) Party coalition. Blessed with two new leaders – two men prepared to defy the woke establishment and media – they “preferenced” the One Party candidate ensuring One Nation won the seat. Don’t forget Pauline Hanson has been far more of a persona non grata to the Australian establishment elite than Nigel Farage has to ours. I can’t see him having the chutzpah to turn up to Parliament wearing a full burqa!

Far better than anything I can write to capture the significance of the moment is David Flint’s account in Spectator Australia, titled “The Farrer earthquake: how the commentariat got it wrong“.

It is so good that I feel sure that Editor Rowan Dean will forgive me for quoting big chunks from it:

    The political establishment is in a state of shock … When Sky News Australia took the unprecedented step of calling the Farrer by-election for One Nation at an extraordinarily early hour, it wasn’t just calling a seat; it was announcing the end of an era. For the first time in Australian history, One Nation has captured a House of Representatives seat at an election, and if the current opinion polls are any indication, it is merely the first of many.

And that is the point. He goes on:

    The “commentariat” – that insulated class of pundits and pollsters – has spent years repeating the tired myth that One Nation is a party of complaint but not of policy …

    Farrer has proven that the commentariat’s “no-policies” narrative was a delusion. Australians are not merely “protesting”; they are voting for a platform of common sense, consistently put forward by Pauline Hanson and Senator Malcolm Roberts – one that the major parties have long since abandoned.

Flint argues that it presages the death of the major party monopoly: “The result reflects a deep-seated exhaustion with the status quo. Labor is no longer the party of the worker; it has become the party of the inner-city elite. The Greens, far from being environmentalists, seem content to see our landscape ruined by industrial ‘renewables’ to enrich foreign interests – propping up what Donald Trump rightly called the ‘world’s biggest fraud’. In contrast, voters have responded to a leader who tells the simple truth.”

April 18, 2026

Australia’s age verification scheme – a great success!

Filed under: Australia, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Every time a politician gets up on hind legs to propose yet another brilliant scheme to ensure little Jaden and little Daenerys don’t access adult content on the internet, I remind myself that it’s going to be pitting the tech know-how of people who need help opening child-proof caps against the youngsters they get to open the child-proof caps for them. In other words, it’s not going to work out quite how the politicians expect:

“Kid-notebook-computer-learns-159533” by LuidmilaKot is marked with CC0 1.0 .

Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges — and they’re debatable — politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids’ online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.

[…]

“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban”, reports the U.K.’s Molly Rose Foundation, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. “Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts.”

The group adds that “70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was ‘easy’ to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts.”

Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that “a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms’ age assurance systems”.

Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, “around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account”. Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.

April 11, 2026

Aussies & Tanks: The Story of Australian Armour

Filed under: Australia, Britain, History, Military, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 30 Jan 2026

Australia has always been an outlier when it comes to tanks. The first time Australians fought alongside tanks, it was such a disaster they almost gave up on the whole idea. And the first time they fought IN tanks, they were pinched from the enemy.

They’re the only Allied nation to reject the M4 Sherman. More than once, they’ve used their tanks very differently to how they were designed. Yet somehow, they’ve almost always been successful.

So, why do the Australians use tanks so differently to everybody else?

Join James and Fam as they explore the weird and wonderful ways that our Australian cousins have used their tanks. From captured tanks in the desert, to heavy metal in the jungle, the Aussie methods of armoured warfare have always seemed a little upside down from the outside.

While Australian interest in tanks has come and gone, when the need has arisen, the Australian tank force has been up to the challenge. Simply put, Australian soldiers usually use tanks differently because they usually fight differently. And despite long periods of neglect, tanks in the Australian Army always seem to find a way to bounce back.

00:00 | Introduction
00:36 | A Bad Start
03:44 | Tanks of their Own
06:19 | Welcome to the Jungle
11:07 | Lessons Relearned
13:53 | Defence of Australia
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March 30, 2026

Net Zero or mass immigration, pick one (or better, pick neither)

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lorenzo Warby points out the blindingly obvious (to anyone with common sense) fact that the top two pet projects of western transnationalist elites — Net Zero and mass third-world immigration — are in direct conflict with one another. But rather than choosing one form of societal suicide over the other, the healthy alternative is to absolutely reject both:

Culturally more homogeneous democracies are happier than more culturally diverse democracies. Also, in the Anglophone countries, where the centre-right won the most recent national election, happiness went up slightly. Where the centre-left won the most recent national election, happiness went down noticeably.

Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.

What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.

National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.

It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.

As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:

    by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.

Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.

Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration — higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures) — are then magnified.

March 10, 2026

Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry

Filed under: Australia, Books, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:

… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.

But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.

Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.

In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.

Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.

Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”

The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.

Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.

March 9, 2026

The FIRST Tank Battle – Villers-Bretonneux, 1918: Mark IV v A7V

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum and Queensland Museum
Published 14 Nov 2025

By spring 1918, the British Mark IV tank has been in service for almost a year. It had proved itself during the Battle of Cambrai – the males attacking concrete emplacements, and the females fending off the infantry. But the Mark IV has never been tested against another tank …

The German A7V hasn’t served on the battlefield very long. While it has mobility and stability issues, it does have thicker armour than the British tanks – and is more heavily armed. On paper, this looks like it will be a close call.

Villers-Bretonneux is the first time in history that a tank fought another tank. It’s a day that would change the face of warfare forever.

00:00 | Introduction
00:50 | The Mark IV
02:57 | The A7V
05:30 | The Battle of Villers-Bretonneux
06:44 | Mark IV vs A7V
09:09 | Who won?
(more…)

February 1, 2026

Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter reacts to an Australian race-grievance grifter “Race Discrimination Commissioner” bloviating talking about Australia as “stolen land”:

The implicit meaning of this framing is that Anglos stole the land so it’s only fair for them to give hundreds of millions of Hindoids the opportunity to steal the land.

Revealed preference demonstrates this. If he believes the land is stolen, and he believes theft is morally wrong, then he would not accept a salary of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Australian government (this is blood money), and he wouldn’t live in Australia.

Since he doesn’t do either of those things, he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying, or he does but he doesn’t think theft is bad, in which case he’s simply trying to emotionally manipulate white Australians by using their own morality against them in order to guilt them into continuing to allow him and people like him to parasitize the Australian people.

He then elaborates:

It really cannot be emphasized enough how dishonest all of this is.

America stole land from the natives, purchased some African farm equipment, and has always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “open the borders and give us your country”.

Canada is built on stolen land, sent some kids to boarding school, and has also always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “Let my people in, saar”.

Australia, same narrative as Canada.

New Zealand, same as Australia.

Britain did an imperialism, therefore “your country belongs to us now, saar”.

France, same as England.

Spain, same as France.

Ireland never had an empire and hasn’t had slaves since the Viking Age, and indeed was itself colonized by England … therefore Ireland must accept unlimited migration in solidarity with other post-colonial countries.

Germany was too mean to Jews for a few years, therefore Germans must abolish themselves and give their country to North Africans.

The only peoples the Swedes ever conquered or enslaved were neighbouring Europeans, but Sweden might have sold some iron that might have gotten used on some slave ships a few centuries ago, therefore must open its borders to Bomalians and give them all the rape toys they can penetrate.

The justification differs, but the conclusion is always the same: open borders and ethnic replacement.

The uniformity of the repugnant conclusion indicates that these narratives are formed by reasoning back from that tendentious repugnance, with the arguments tailored to national conditions using whatever specific historical circumstances are handy, with the intent of emotionally manipulating native populations into laying down their arms, foregoing resistance, and placidly accepting the loss of their countries to the hundreds of millions of third-worlders intent on flooding every developed white country on the planet.

The people making these arguments don’t believe a word that they say. Their seething resentment for Europeans is entirely real, but this is almost entirely an inferiority complex, humiliation at having been so easily conquered and then taught to eat and wipe with something other than their hands. They don’t believe that slavery or conquest are wrong: if they did, they wouldn’t still practice slavery, and they wouldn’t be trying to conquer the West in the guise of beggars, by shamelessly playing to our pity and misplaced guilt. They say these things in order to trick you by playing on a conscience they don’t have themselves. It’s a sales tactic, and they’re selling you annihilation.

January 25, 2026

Mythologizing Australia’s “noble savages”

Filed under: Australia, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Celina101 provides examples of Australian Aborigine behaviour vastly at odds with the progressive belief in the “noble savage” myths:

For decades a rosy and romanticised narrative has prevailed: pre-contact Aboriginal Australia was a utopian paradise, and British colonists the only villains. Yet, the historical record painstakingly chronicled by scholars like William D. Rubinstein and Keith Windschuttle, tells a far more complex, often brutal story. This article examines how politically charged revisionism has whitewashed practices such as infanticide, cannibalism and endemic violence in traditional Aboriginal societies. It also warns that distorting history for ideology does a disservice to all Australians, especially Anglo-Australians who have been bludgeoned over the head with it.

The Noble Savage in Modern Narrative

Many contemporary accounts frame Aboriginals as the ultimate “noble savages”, a peaceful, egalitarian people living in harmony with nature until the arrival of the cruel evil British colonists. Textbooks, media and some activists repeatedly emphasise colonial wrongs while glossing over pre-contact realities. But historians like William D. Rubinstein challenge this rosy picture. Rubinstein bluntly notes that, in contrast to other civilisations that underwent the Neolithic agricultural revolution, Aboriginal society “failed … to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology” for 65,000 years. In his words, pre-contact Aboriginal life was “65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery“. This harsh summary confronts the myth head-on: it implies that life before colonisation was not idyllic, but marked by entrenched violence and brutality.

The danger of the noble-savage myth, Rubinstein argues, is that it inverts history. By idealising and practically lying [about] Aboriginal society, modern narratives often cast settlers as uniquely evil. In one essay he warns that contemporary inquiries (like Victoria’s Yoorrook Commission) are “defined to ascribe all blame to the impact of colonialism, rather than the persisting deficiencies in traditional Aboriginal society“. Ignoring those “gross, often horrifying, shortcomings” in Aboriginal culture, Rubinstein says, can only produce “findings written in the ink of obfuscation and deception“. In short, to truly understand Australia’s past we must examine it dispassionately, acknowledging human failings on all sides, not just one.

Documented Brutalities in Pre-Contact Society

Early observers and anthropologists left abundant evidence that some pre-colonial Aboriginal practices were brutal by modern standards. The selective amnesia about these practices in progressive narratives is striking. For example, infanticide (the intentional killing of newborns) was a widespread means of population control in traditional Aboriginal tribes. University of Michigan anthropologist Aram Yengoyan estimated that infanticide “could have been as high as 40% to 50% of all births … In actuality [it] probably ranged from 15% to 30% of all births“. In practice, this meant large numbers of healthy babies, especially girls, were deliberately killed to cope with limited resources. Babies up to a few years old who fell ill or were deemed surplus were often strangled or left to die. This grim truth is rarely mentioned in schools or media today. According to Rubinstein, it was “ubiquitous” in Australia prior to Western influence.

Several anthropological accounts describe cannibalism of infants and small children in some regions. For instance, an 19th-century observer on the northern coast reported: “Cannibalism is practised by all natives on the north coast … Only children of tender age – up to about two years old, are considered fit subjects for food, and if they fall ill are often strangled by the old men, cooked, and eaten… Parents eat their own children … young and old, [all] partake of it.” (In this passage, even adults were implicated in rare cases: two lost Europeans were reportedly killed and eaten by a tribe in 1874.) Such accounts are shocking, yet they were recorded by colonial-era missionaries and explorers. Today’s activists tend to dismiss or deny them entirely.

January 21, 2026

QotD: White elephant airports

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Germany, Government, History, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Few things capture modern planning like a multibillion-dollar airport no one’s entirely sure will have any planes. Enter Western Sydney International Airport (WSI), Australia’s shiny $5 billion gamble at Badgerys Creek. It’s a development so hyped it already has merch, an anticipated metro line, and a better skincare routine than most of us, despite rumors it may spend its first year servicing only freight and the occasional confused ibis.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that airports, like wrinkle creams which cost the GDP of a small country but couldn’t iron out a bedsheet, can be wildly overpromised and underdelivered. Western Sydney’s runway might yet join the vainglorious global herd of White Elephant Airports: majestic, expensive, and standing alone in a field wondering where everyone went.

Let’s take a safari.

Mirabel: Montreal’s Monument to Inconvenience

Built in 1975, Mirabel International was meant to replace Montreal’s Dorval Airport and usher in a new aviation era. Instead, it became the architectural embodiment of “We should’ve checked the map”. Located more than 50 kilometers from the city, it was so unpopular that passengers would rather fling themselves onto dogsleds than make the commute.

Eventually, Mirabel stopped pretending to be an airport and transitioned into its second act: a car-racing track and film set. Somewhere in Quebec there’s probably still a baggage carousel being used as a wedding dance floor.

Ciudad Real: A Billion-Euro Garage Sale

Spain saw Mirabel and said, “Hold my sangria”. Ciudad Real International Airport opened in 2009 with a €1.1 billion price tag, dreams of high-speed rail links, and the confidence of a Bachelor contestant in week one. Within three years, it had no flights, no buyers, and no shame.

It was eventually auctioned for €10,000, less than a parking space in Bondi or a bottle of champagne at a Sydney rooftop bar. One imagines the bidding process was just two blokes shrugging in a room and someone whispering, “Ten grand and a paella voucher?”

Berlin Brandenburg: German Efficiency, But Make It Chaos

If you’ve ever wanted to see what happens when a nation famous for precision tries on farce, just pay a visit to Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Construction began in 2006, with an opening scheduled for 2011. By 2015, it was such a national embarrassment that Berliners stopped making jokes about British plumbing to recover emotionally.

In 2020, it finally launched amid the global COVID pandemic, after delays caused by faulty fire systems, suspicious cables, and the ghost of every German engineer pacing in dismay.

Nicole James, “Australia’s New Albino Elephant Sanctuary (Now with Parking)”, The Freeman, 2025-10-16.

December 19, 2025

Brendan O’Neill on the Islamophobia racket

Filed under: Australia, Government, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Brendan O’Neill criticizes Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in particular, but he’s just the most recent exemplar of western politicians trying to blame society in general and “right wing extremists” in particular for the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists:

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke a total of 5,022 words in the day after the slaughter of Jews at Bondi Beach. And not one of those words was “Islam”. Or “Muslim”. Or even “Islamic extremism”.

He did talk about the “far right” though. Twice. We need to tackle “the rise of right-wing extremist groups”, he said.

What an odd thing to focus on the day after a father-and-son Islamofascist outfit had mown down 15 innocents, all while proudly displaying the black flag of ISIS.

To fret about the far right hours after suspected Islamic militants had carried out the worst slaughter of Jews in Australian history is cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.

It would be like turning up to the bloody aftermath of a KKK massacre and flat-out refusing to say the words “Klansmen”, “racist” or “white supremacist”. Well, we wouldn’t want to offend the pointed-hood community.

Some Australians were dumbfounded by the PM’s bullish refusal to name the ideology that fuelled this act of antisemitic savagery.

After all, at the time he was holding forth on the various threats to the Aussie way of life, officialdom had found the killers’ ISIS flag and other paraphernalia suggesting they had taken the knee to the death cult of radical Islam.

“What happened at Bondi was an act of radical Islamic terrorism”, thundered Sean Bell of the populist party One Nation. If the PM “cannot be honest” about the “radical Islamic ideology”, he said, “then he has no place leading the country”.

It’s hard to disagree. The first duty of a leader following the barbarous slaying of citizens is to tell the truth. If Albanese can’t even bring himself to mouth the words “Islamic extremism”, how’s he going to fight it?

The PM’s yellow-bellied dodging of the i-word was shocking but not surprising. Other Western leaders have behaved similarly in the wake of Islamist outrages. They have furiously thumbed their thesauruses for spins on the word “extremist” — fanatic, militant, evil — all so that they can avoid committing that most gauche faux pas in polite society: talking about the problems in Islam.

This is the dire handiwork of the Islamophobia industry. For years now, Islam has been ruthlessly ringfenced from free, frank discussion.

Mock Muhammad and you’ll be damned as “phobic”. Crack a joke about the Koran and you can expect a mob of fundamentalists at your front door. Say Islam has an extremism problem and the self-elected guardians of correct-think will drag you off for re-education.

We’ve witnessed the rehabilitation of medieval strictures against “blasphemy”. The end result is that even as women and children writhe in agony from the wounds inflicted on them by Islamist militants, still our leaders won’t say that i-word. It clogs in their throats. They dread cancellation more than they cherish truth.

[…]

After every attack, the same platitudes are trotted out. “Nothing to do with Islam”. “Islam is a religion of peace”. We’re gagged from naming the threat we face, from correctly identifying the men who are killing our fellow citizens.

Believe them when they show you what they are, Oz edition:

In The Line, Ariella Kimmel thinks there are signs that at least some political figures are getting the right lessons out of the events of the last few years:

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Bondi Beach, it seems as if leaders are finally starting to realize the risk of allowing antisemitic extremism to run unchecked for years.

Calgary’s new mayor offered a powerful example of what this means in practice.

At Calgary City Hall’s Chanukah celebration, Mayor Jeromy Farkas delivered remarks that stood out not only for their eloquence, but for their accountability. He spoke plainly about antisemitism and acknowledged the very real fear that Jewish communities are living with. Most importantly, he made clear that civic leadership means showing up publicly, consistently, and without excuses.

In a room of just over a thousand, he declared “let me be absolutely crystal clear. There is no place for antisemitism in Calgary. Not on our streets, not in our schools or campuses, not at protests, not online, not hidden behind slogans, not excused as politics, because Jewish lives are not expendable. Jewish safety is not expendable.”

That moment was especially symbolic given Calgary’s recent past. Two years ago, then-Mayor Jyoti Gondek refused to attend a Chanukah event amid pressure and controversy. Farkas’ presence this week marked a break from that pattern. It signalled that someone, finally, was willing to take responsibility.

That is what leadership looks like.

The Bondi Beach attack should force a reckoning in Canada. If we want to avoid becoming the next headline, this country must do more than mourn; we must decide, clearly and concretely, that extremism has consequences and that antisemitism will not be indulged.

In Canada, politicians were quick to offer condolences. Statements flowed with the standard lines – “my thoughts are with the community”, “our government condemns all forms of hate”, “no one should be targeted for practicing their religion”. The words are familiar, and quite frankly hollow, because for the past two years, many of the same leaders issuing their thoughts and prayers have either ignored, excused, or actively engaged with movements that normalize hostility toward Jews.

Since October 7, Jewish Canadians have watched as public spaces became hostile territory. Synagogues require police protection, while Jewish schools are shot at and community centres are defaced. Rallies openly glorify terrorist groups, call for the destruction of Israel, and chant slogans that any reasonable person understands as genocidal, such as calls to “globalize the intifada”, “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”, “there is only one solution, intifada revolution”, and “resistance is justified”.

What makes the current moment particularly dangerous is the gap between rhetoric and reality among leaders. Politicians speak of fighting hate while refusing to enforce existing laws against intimidation, mischief, and hate-motivated harassment. They speak of unity while legitimizing groups and movements that openly reject the safety of Jewish communities, even giving funding through government programs meant to combat antisemitism, to organizations that perpetrate it. They issue statements condemning violence abroad while tolerating the ideological conditions that make violence inevitable at home.

December 17, 2025

“The core hypocrisy of modern Western governance”

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo discusses the extremely weird experience we’ve all lived through since 9/11 in almost every major western nation:

For more than 20 years, Western governments told their citizens that Islamist extremism posed an existential threat. Entire generations were sent to fight the Global War on Terror. Soldiers were killed, families were broken, civil liberties were curtailed, and trillions were spent, all justified by the claim that terrorism had to be stopped over there so it would not reach us here.

Then something strange happened.

The same governments that built their legitimacy on that fear now insist that even discussing the cultural, security, or integration risks associated with mass immigration from unstable regions is immoral. Raise concerns and you are no longer a citizen asking questions, but a bigot, an extremist, or a threat yourself. In some countries, speech alone now draws police attention, while violent acts are reframed as isolated incidents or stripped of ideological context.

The irony deepens when you look at the timeline.

During the first years of Covid, terrorism all but vanished from news coverage, just as Covid seemed to erase the common cold, cancer, and every other cause of death from public discourse. Nothing had disappeared. The narrative had simply changed. Attention was redirected. Fear was reassigned.

Now, as governments pursue aggressive mass immigration policies, the public is told that questioning outcomes is unacceptable, even as the very threats once used to justify war reappear domestically. The message is clear and profoundly cynical: the danger was real when it justified foreign wars, but discussion becomes forbidden when it complicates domestic policy.

This is not tolerance. It is coercion.

And now comes the final insult.

The same political class that demands silence at home is preparing to demand sacrifice abroad. The same citizens who are told to accept social breakdown, rising crime, collapsing services, and cultural fragmentation are being told they may soon be required to fight Russia to “defend our way of life”.

What way of life, exactly?

The one being systematically dismantled by the very governments issuing the call. The one they are actively transforming into something unrecognizable through reckless policy, moral intimidation, and managed decline. They are asking people to die for values they no longer practice and for societies they are actively degrading.

This is the core hypocrisy of modern Western governance.

We were told to fight, bleed, and die to defend liberal democratic values. Now we are told those same values require silence, compliance, and obedience, while our countries are reshaped without consent and against the will of the people who built them.

A government that suppresses debate at home while demanding loyalty abroad is not defending democracy. It is consuming it.

And history is not kind to regimes that ask their people to die for a future they are busy destroying.

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