It is the work of so many amazing Australian women to finally get “men are not women” on the front page of the newspaper, and absolutely unforgivable that it’s a fight we’ve had to have in the first place. But we’re not giving up until we have our rights back.

Trump sees Albo as a friend. Trump has a lot of friends. Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Sean "Diddy" Combs. I guess if you want to be in a gallery of international rogues it's a rare compliment.

The distorted face of racism in the USA. Once it used to be whites against blacks, but now it runs the other way.

Appalling 🧵 I want those who champion men in women’s sport to explain why they’re happy to put girls at risk like this.

Nuclear is the fuel of the future, and Labor is the party of the past. We've used wind and sun for millennia, but today there are better technologies. But Chris Bowen can't see it because he can't admit he's wrong, just like every other legacy entrepreneur who've been sent broke by new technologies.

Is this humanity's future - to be spectators while AI does all the work? Seems this academic has got the vibe. Work with no effort.

Parties that take the migrant vote for granted might be surprised.

Labor's ongoing privatisation of electricity hits a bump. Consumers don't want to share their batteries with the grid. Wouldn't want to find the battery drained just when you need it to charge the Tesla. $3.3 bn for not very much.

NZ housing affordability continues to improve because they've taken the hard decisions unlike Australia where we treat housing as a tax generator for spendthrift governments. And our young get locked out of home ownership while rents go up.

It appears, according to the pro-immigration spruikers at Crikey that Australians aren't smart enough to be doctors and nurses, they need to be imported. From this one might draw the conclusion we might be better off importing our journalists as well, because the domestic standard is underwhelming.

“But what riles me about Gillard’s misogyny schtick is that she presided over the greatest act of legislative misogyny against women in this country we have ever seen when she gutted the sex discrimination act to completely removed our biological rights.” This is 100% true.

I grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Israel was not a country in my education. It was a crime. A wound kept open on purpose. Every funeral, every slogan, every sermon pointed in the same direction: there, across the border, is the source of your suffering. Believe it. Repeat it. Pass it on. I believed it. I repeated it. For years. Then I moved to France. And I met Jews. Not the abstraction. Not the enemy. People. Neighbors. Colleagues. And the collision between what I had been taught and what I was seeing in front of me was so violent — so intellectually embarrassing — that I had no honest choice but to start over. To read. To ask. To dismantle, brick by brick, everything I had been given as truth. What I found on the other side of that dismantling was not just the absence of hatred. It was something I had not expected: admiration. Let me be precise about what I am defending and what I am not. I am not defending every Israeli policy. I am not defending any government unconditionally. I am not asking anyone to check their critical faculties at the door. I am defending what Israel is. What it represents. What it has built, against every conceivable pressure, in a region that has largely failed its own people. Israel is a democracy in a neighborhood of autocracies. It is a state governed by law in a region where law is routinely weaponized against citizens. It is a country where Arabs sit in parliament, where women lead, where dissent is not a death sentence. It is imperfect — as every democracy is — but it is genuinely, structurally different from everything surrounding it. That difference is not incidental. It is the point. The so-called Palestinian cause, as it is prosecuted today, is not a national liberation movement. I say this not to dismiss Palestinian suffering; suffering is real, and real people pay its price. I say it because the infrastructure of the “cause” — its funders, its ideologues, its loudest champions — has never been interested in Palestinian statehood. It has been interested in Jewish elimination. Look at who built the movement’s international architecture. Look at the 1997 Tehran OIC summit, where the language of “apartheid” was first systematically attached to Israel, not by Palestinians, but by the Iranian regime, for export. Look at Durban. Look at who profits when the conflict continues and who loses when it resolves. The answer is never the Palestinian family in Gaza. The answer is always the regime, the militia, the ideological infrastructure that needs the wound open. The Palestinian cause, as it functions on the world stage today, is a tool of an anti-western civilizational project. Its goal is not a state alongside Israel. Its goal is a world without Israel, and, by extension, a world where the values Israel represents are defeated. Liberal democracy. Jewish self-determination. The idea that a small people can survive, build, and insist on their own dignity against the will of those who would erase them. When western progressives march under that banner, they are not marching for freedom. They are marching for the annihilation of the only thing in the Middle East that resembles what they claim to value. I came to Judaism slowly, the way you come to something true, not in a rush, but in accumulation. It was not the politics that moved me first. It was the texts. The insistence, running through thousands of years of Jewish thought, that the human being is created in the image of G-d, and that this is not a metaphor but an obligation. An obligation to see the other. To argue. To question. To hold power accountable, including your own. I had grown up in a culture where the highest virtue was submission. To the leader, the militia, the narrative. Judaism confronted me with the opposite proposition… Read the rest of the essay on my Facebook page.

Let’s zoom out and look at what the climate movement is actually asking of us. They’re asking us to dismantle the fossil fuel energy system that has produced the greatest abundance in human history. Because of a byproduct called CO2—a plant food that NASA satellites show has contributed to 50% more green cover across the globe. All because of a fear that extreme weather like droughts, hurricanes, and flooding will get worse, sea-levels will rise steeply, and crops will suffer. But the empirical data from the last 40 years shows none of that is actually happening. Crop yields are at record highs, extreme weather shows no change, and sea-level is rising at a steady 3mm/year. Still, the argument goes, maybe someday in the future things could get worse. So we need to spend trillions transitioning off reliable, abundant, energy-dense fossil fuels onto unreliable, land-hungry technologies like solar and wind. We have to do this with taxpayer money. Not because voters chose it—but because governments are mandating it. And here’s the kicker: it won’t even work. The countries adopting net-zero goals represent a fraction of global emissions. China and India are still developing fossil fuels as fast as they can—and cheap energy is pulling our manufacturing straight to them. Every country that guts its fossil fuel infrastructure will make itself poorer, hollow out its industrial base, and kill jobs—while global emissions keep rising. Oh, and because solar and wind are intermittent, we still need backup gas and oil infrastructure on standby for when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. So we’re paying for both systems. And nuclear—the most energy-dense, reliable, zero-emission power source we have—is also off the table. Did I get that right?

Is it true NZ PM Christopher Luxon has a photo of Jim Chalmers in his wallet for luck? CGT changes could make New Zealand a virtual, rich 7th state of Australia. Work and invest there, holiday in Australia. Could be the making of Middle Earth.

Three Australian politicians are currently complaining about misogyny & sexism. But - @JacintaAllanMP, the Victorian Labor premier, has men in women’s prisons, school girls not drinking water and women punished for not accepting men as women. @AlboMP, the Australian prime minister, has called the destruction of women’s rights a “culture war”, ignoring pleas to ensure women have rights & protections in federal legislation. @JuliaGillard, during her time as the first women prime minister, removed the definition of women from war, igniting the “culture war”. Calling out misogyny & sexism when it impacts you while ignoring Australian women & girls who are experiencing ideological & institutional misogyny & sexism on a daily basis is not a good look and it simply highlights the hypocrisy. It confirms our suspicion that you only care about yourselves. If you’re going to cry misogyny & sexism, first make sure that you’re not a perpetrator of it.

A week ago, Grattan released a report, called "Out of gas". I think it's something quite profound and awe-inspiring to behold. This is the last gasp of the credulous climate absolutists. Like seeing the last Thylacine, or Dodo. Grattan now occupies this exquisite remnant habitat of deep-Melbourne-progressive-globalist-elite-academia. They aren't aware this habitat doesn't actually have a place in the new political world order. They're smart enough and honest enough to know that the transition required to switch from fossil-fuels to renewable-electrified systems will require massive costs and coersion to bring about. And they're honest enough to look you in the eye, and state in plain language that it should and must be done anyway. Because climate targets are paramount, right? They show absolutely no awareness of the enormous betrayal that the mainstream would sense (if they read long academic reports) at the admission that the project is expensive, and requires economic pain and impingement of liberties to accomplish. It was always meant to be an initiative to reduce cost-of living pressures, and usher in new industrial productivity, right? The whole paper is weirdly oblivious to dominant policy mindsets, variously more (or less) intelligent and honest, which their position fails to cohere with: There's the dumb (or dishonest) transition advocates who persist in the narrative that electrification actually costs less than traditional energy. The market will get things done, if only we let it, or maybe just nudge it to get it unstuck. But really costs are lower, and people will wake up and adopt the right preferences imminently, mostly driven by the superiority and increased affordability of green alternatives. This is D'Ambrosio, Bowen, or Kean. But this Grattan report offers them no comfort, because of how bleakly they announced that all the miracle-cures like bio-gas, green hydrogen etc don't scale well, and how expensive the abandonment of shared infrastructure is. Then there's the savvy compromisers, like Minns and Malinouskas, who have whole-heartedly embraced gas as a cleaner alternative to coal. Not just a transition fuel, but something to be grown and developed. They're deeply concerned about costs and affordability, and wouldn't contemplate strong coercive measures, like banning gas appliances, or paying industry to shut off production while gas infrastructure is slowly disassembled. And of course, there's the climate and energy realists, who now represent the Taylor, Cananvan, Joyce, Hanson, everyone right of the left wing of Labor, who get that Net Zero is neither achievable nor necessary, as the plan to electrify everything with renewable energy isn't going to work at all, in Australia or elsewhere. And with the rest of the world not moving to net-zero either, the pain that Australia is justified in experiencing to lead the fast-thinning pack of climate absolutists is pretty close to zero. Grattan's report, which elevates emissions targets above everything, won't even register with them. So Grattan's stance here, declaring the transition to be expensive and painful, but unavoidable and essential, puts them firmly on the path to intellectual irrelevance. This is the last stand of the righteous-but-honest, climate-absolutist intellectual pitching to the mainstream. I admire their ignorance of political realities. In the same kind of way I admire the athletic and instinctive movements of the last Tasmanian Tiger filmed in captivity, still very much its own creature in the moment, detached from the doom that their lonely existence portends to the informed onlooker. 1/

Whoever came up with the billboard idea certainly got their hundred thousand dollar's worth of publicity. Amazing how Labor tries to blow everything up into a scandal when they need a diversion. I'm still trying to work out what is misogynistic about calling someone a witch. Is diva now sexist? What about harrridan, shrew, nag, fishwife, Karen? And are lout, yob, prick, Hitler misandrist?

Where was Albo when there was a real risk of antisemitic violence? There is no chance anyone is going to burn Jacinta Allen at the stake and there is no general or specific threat to witches. Another example of misplaced priorities.

This duplex went for 10% more than it was worth because it is new and won't be affected by CGT and NG changes. Bad luck first home buyers. You will have trouble buying new. Thanks Jim and Albo.

Trump in some Jimmy Carter 1978-1979 place where he thinks his negotiators are dealing with anyone who can bind the decapitated Iranian regime ... priority should be destroying the IRGC & Basij which are the powers behind the throne