The restaurant, which I will call Ponsy’s, for the sake of the story, was in Ponsonby, an area of the city distinguished by the very high prices of the very small houses that fashionable people paid to live in, on narrow streets without garages or parking, that used to be occupied by railway and post office workers 40 years ago. It is the type of chic urban district where hairdressing salons, personal trainers and artisan bakers are unaffected by recession.

So, I shaved, brushed my hair and put on a smart linen suit, then called for a taxi. I live in a part of the city where I gave up calling Ubers long ago, having grown sick of standing in the street watching my phone screen as they reversed direction in order to deliver Uber Eats on the way. The central city is not a part of town where it is pleasant standing on the street at night looking at your iPhone screen.

The taxi arrived quickly and I gave directions to Ponsy’s.

The Indian driver turned to me with a broad smile. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but you look very like President Trump.’

My friend and I were both taken aback (though I seem to recall that she sniggered). ‘I’m not as big,’ I replied snootily, ‘nor as orange I hope.’

‘But you are very important, I think,’ he persisted. “I know when I have important people in my car.’

Luckily Ponsonby is a short ride away and he knew the direction to take as, of course, they all have large screens on their dashboards these days and can become taxi drivers within two days of arriving in the country. As we pulled up outside Ponsy’s he turned to me again.

‘Ah, now I remember, sir,’ he exclaimed; ‘you are a famous actor on television.’

‘No, I’m not famous and I’m not on television,’ I insisted. ‘Now, what do I owe you?’

‘Well, sir, if you have cash I can make it cheaper. Do you have cash?’

It so happened that I did. I’ve been carrying cash in my billfold for nearly ten years unable to find anywhere that is willing to take it. ‘How much is the fare?’ I asked.

“I reduce it to just twenty dollars.’

I gave him a fifty dollar note and waited for the change, which seemed to be a long time coming. ‘Oh, I only have twenty dollars change,’ he apologised. ‘Do you need the exact change?’

‘In that case, I’ll pay with my credit card,’ I replied, which remarkably caused another note to appear in his hand.

We swept into the restaurant on a wave of high expectation, bonhomie and air kissing and could not fault any aspect of our meal. When we’d finished, the change from our taxi ride came out of my jacket pocket and into the hand of the attentive waiter who’d unhesitatingly swapped out my rather indifferent red wine for something more robust at no extra cost, and the lovely young lady taking our payment summoned a cab to take us home.

Same company, different Indian driver, similar greeting. (I mention the race of the driver because it becomes relevant later, not because I am highlighting a stereotype, God forbid.)

‘Good evening, sir,’ he gushed. ‘That is a very magnificent restaurant, I hear. Important people come. You must be important.’

‘No, not important at all.’ I gave him the address of the high-rise enclave in which I live. After a minute or two in silence he couldn’t help himself.

‘Sir, they say that apartments in your building cost sixteen million dollars. You must be very wealthy I think. It is an honour.’

‘No, I am not very wealthy. Or famous. Or a relation of President Trump.’

Upon arrival he offered the opportunity once again to pay a lesser fare if I had cash. So another fifty-dollar bill came out of my billfold. This time I said I would like both the change and a receipt. The change, if a little slow, was forthcoming, but the receipt was not.

‘I’m very sorry, sir, but if I give you a receipt I will have to charge the full amount.’

Of course, he would. How silly of me. I put the thirty-dollar change in my top pocket and went inside. All in all a very pleasant evening, I concluded. On taking out my apartment key, however, I realised I didn’t have my cell phone. It is a moment that makes one realise how closely the bowels are connected to the brain; a moment of utter helplessness. The concierge on duty was a very nice Philippine who seemed most concerned about my heart condition. We called my phone unsuccessfully and then phoned the restaurant (they are very slow to answer during service time) and I asked the lovely young lady who’d processed my payment if she could please rush immediately to our table. Nothing had been found, she reported. I asked her to waylay the wine steward, the two waiters who’d served us, the maître d’. Nothing had been found. So I phoned the taxi company.

After ten minutes trying to get past the booking AI an option came up for “Lost and Found”. An Indian voice answered. I was very clear and direct. ‘I left my cell phone in your cab which collected me from Poncy’s Restaurant exactly twenty-five minutes ago. Can you please contact him immediately and ask him to come back to my address. I’m willing to pay if necessary.’

‘A lost phone.’ I could hear him typing. ‘I will add it to our items on Lost and Found and you should call back tomorrow after drivers finish their shifts and clean their vehicles.’

‘No, I want you please to contact the driver now. You’ll have a record of the booking and the car’s number so treat this as a request to have that car and driver come to pick me up urgently. I will pay.’

‘I see a request on screen for that pick-up address, but the booking was cancelled. No-one was picked up. I cannot speak directly to the driver, but I can leave a message.’

‘Just a minute,’ I protested. Then my anxiety began to turn to cold fear. Naturally the driver had registered his cash fare as having been cancelled, otherwise he would have had to account for the cash. ‘Am I speaking to a call centre?’ I asked. Yes, I was. Where was this call centre? It was in India. Of course he was unable to talk to the driver.

I sat down in a lobby chair and put my head in my hands. My banking apps, my payment apps, my emails, my contacts, calendar, WhatsApp and messages: this was as bad as losing a passport, credit cards and a child in Armenia. My phone had facial recognition, pin number passwords and two-factor identifications but how many times were they mandatory in order to gain access? A twelve-year-old kid could rob me clean in five minutes.

Images of an earlier time appeared before me when there were red telephone boxes on street corners, when we remembered phone numbers by heart, and we could borrow a penny or sixpenny coin and call home for help. There were even coppers in blue uniforms strolling around town waiting to help get us home. Now our lives are over as soon as we lose a cell phone.

The young concierge, who had been calling my number repeatedly without success, unexpectedly answered her phone. Her English is not perfect, and she held out the phone to me for help.

‘Who is this?’ I asked.

‘Um, Kevin.’

‘How can we help, Kevin?’ I looked down at the phone in my hand. The incoming call was from my own number.

‘Have I got your phone?’ Kevin asked hesitantly.

I leaped to my feet. Where was he? He was downtown. How did he get the phone? He found it in the street. I told him my address. Did he know where it was? He knew. Could he meet me there? Yeah, if I liked. I waited for the catch, but it didn’t come. How long, I asked politely, would it take for him to get there? Not long, he guessed; a couple of minutes.

I wanted to keep him talking so I could monitor his progress. Here was my lifeline and I was desperate not to let it go. But he ended the call and silence filled the funeral parlour that was our building’s foyer. How much was he going to ask for? How much would I be prepared to pay? Five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand?

I called again. He answered. ‘Hi Kevin. Where are you?’

‘Um, I’m outside.’

I rushed to the front doors and opened them. There was a black-clad figure in a hoody, slightly stooped, his face buried in darkness, his feet shuffling uncomfortably as if unused or unsure about standing still. He was dressed for a snowstorm, but it was a fine, mild night. I peered closer, searching for a face and found a grey-bearded one in early middle-age, slim and weathered but evasive, listening to a distant sound.

‘Kevin ...?’ He raised his eyes fleetingly and nodded. ‘Where did you find it, man?’

He pointed at the pavement. It was where our taxi had dropped us. ‘I didn’t know who owned it until someone called. Sorry. I pressed the green button, and it answered. I suppose that was you.’

‘You’re a good man, Kevin’ I said; ‘a very, very good man. I was worried. You’ve saved my life.’ I took the banknotes from my top pocket, reached for his right hand, and shook it nearly off as I transferred the money to him. He looked down at the notes curiously and then looked up at me and nodded, though where he looked was not directly at me but somewhere near my face as if he preferred me to be occluded.

‘Do you live around here?’ I asked.

‘Oh, sometimes, yeah.’

He turned and walked slowly away, not with any obvious intent of going anywhere, and I wondered why I felt so sad when I should have been elated.

So, if you see Kevin, please stop and say hello. Oh, and by the way, the cab fare to Ponsonby is usually sixteen dollars from Downtown.

A.I. Fabler

August 20, 2026

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I should explain that this metaphor occurred to me as I recalled having my tonsils removed when I was 13 years old. The nurse administering the ether told me to start counting aloud up to ten as she poured the ether onto my mask and once I’d got into the thirties, she had to call for another bottle. After I regained consciousness, she told me that my outburst of profanities as I finally surrendered consciousness was the loudest she’d ever heard, which I presumed at the time was what made my throat so sore.

The series of reveals relating to Jason Arday and his odyssey have felt very similar to that extended countdown towards anesthesia that I experienced as a teenager and the effect has taken some days to wear off. Jason’s odyssey, coincidentally, shares some similarities with Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey in so much as it is long and very woke. Nolan’s movie, however, is loosely based on Homer’s ancient mythic tale while Arday’s is based on the very modern drama known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It is a tale of the moral blackmail perpetrated by Progressive Intellectual Elites (PIFs) in which people who support merit and truth are forced out of institutions of higher learning by being falsely accused of racism, colonialism and white privilege in order to make room for black and minority persons of unaudited ability. It portrays the dystopian reality of education.

You can be forgiven for not being fully up to speed with the story of Cambridge University’s youngest ever black professor whose radiant CV has lit up the media firmament, so here is just a fraction of what we have been drip fed over the last week as summarized by the wonderful David Josef Volodsko in his Radicalist Substack:

“In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University. People at the time called him a diversity hire and said he only got the job because he was black. The responses to this were hostile ... History almost never allows it, but this once, everyone was right. Arday was, in the fullest sense of the term, a diversity hire... we now know that in less than three years at Cambridge, Arday has made a mockery of the institution and resigned last week in disgrace after becoming the single biggest story in the news cycle by lying so brazenly and so spectacularly that he makes even the likes of Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke, and Jussie Smollett look like honest brokers.

“To begin, Arday wants you to know he’s not just disabled. He’s the most disabled. Diagnosed with autism at 3, he was mute until 11, illiterate until 18, partially deaf, epileptic after an attack, the survivor of a catastrophic teenage car crash that left him in a coma for months, on life support, with locked-in syndrome, as well as the survivor of a brain tumor that erased his memory two weeks before his PhD defense (but he just tried really hard and passed anyway), as well as a cancer survivor. In his free time, Arday likes to do charity work, and has personally raised millions for more than 70 or 80 charities, although apparently there’s a bookkeeping crisis in the nonprofit sector because none of those charities has heard of him. He also installed water pumps in Africa with WaterAid, except WaterAid says it doesn’t send volunteers abroad. He once appeared on the British documentary show Seven Up!, except that the show aired two decades before he was born...

“... But Arday’s greatest accomplishments are in academia. He received his master’s in psychodynamic practice, as well as his counselling license, at Birkbeck College, University of London. Although Birkbeck says it has no record of him going there. He was also a visiting professor at Ohio State. But the school says this is false. He wrote a book with Palgrave Macmillan. But Palgrave says the book project never got past the proposal stage. He attended Liverpool John Moores University — where, remember, he miraculously relearned his thesis in just two weeks following brain surgery — and got his doctorate degree in education. This bit seems to actually be true, but it’s worth noting that his thesis — An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring among Student Teachers’ to Inform Reflective Practice within the Context of Action Research — is horseshit.”

That is but a small flavour of the porkies that this fabulist has told about himself while earning tenure at Britain’s preeminent educational institution. But first I need to explain that this story arrived at a time when I was at a low ebb, mourning the death of a true shining star last week in the form of Rod Liddle, the tireless banderillero who spent his life as a broadcaster and writer planting darts into the cant and pomposity of society’s mountebanks and frauds. Just as some people take an early morning cold water dip to freshen them up for the day, so have I opened The Spectator and The Telegraph for years in search of Rod’s latest satirical take-down of the news.

In recent times those of us who lament that reality now reads like satire are wont to complain that satire now inevitably reads like reality. Rod was never restrained by that fear; his approach was to present the divisive issues of today deconstructed by humor. In the process he showed no favours, left or right, black or white. While I’m quite sure that Rod wouldn’t have felt as maudlin about his own death as his friends are (‘We’re all going to the same place, my old mate!’) I’m certain he would have been pissed off at having missed the Arday odyssey.

That got me thinking. A friend of mine gave me a very posh leather-bound Caran d’Ache notebook that came with a Mont Blanc pen and has sat on my shelf unused and pristine because I have been afraid of making the first entry. What if I turned it into a diary of the sort of snippets that Rod was missing while he’s away? The Dalai Lama recently announced that he intended living to 130 and would then be reincarnated, so I see no reason why Rod couldn’t return with him and pick up where he left off.

It was with this thought in mind that I retrieved an article he’d written in The Spectator March 2024 titled How to Write a Modern Screenplay. In it he said, “If you are putting a black person in your film – and you must, you must, even if it is set in bloody Lapland – then he or she is obviously on the side of the angels, despite perhaps being treated with initial suspicion by the white supremacists who comprise the other characters”. It seemed to me to be the perfect template; prescient even.

So I immediately started drafting an outline for the script. Arday is to be played by Jussie Smollett, the great black actor famous for hiring two movie extras to attack him, and put a noose around his neck while shouting racial slurs including “This is MAGA country n---er”. His devoted mother is to be played by Claudine Gay, the first ever black Harvard president and DEI tsar who declared that the acceptability of calls for the genocide of Jews would “depend on the context”. If she was not available then British Labour MP Dianne Abbott could be approached.

The opening scene has Arday cradled in his mother’s arms as she whispers, “Oh, beautiful son, though you be autistic and unable to speak, see or walk, know that this is true and ordained by mysterious spirit gods, that you will one day run across Africa in a day, Australia in two days and America in three, despite having only one leg. And you will arrive at Cambridge University where the PIFs of that great academy will greet you as the most learned and the most wise in the ways of critical woke. But the journey will sometimes be beyond belief ...”

Rod’s Diary is filling fast so if you’ve got a few spare Caran d’Ache notebooks lying around I’d be keen to receive them.

A.I. Fabler

August 15, 2026

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You might think that that’s at least a good start. Now, if we could only get people to insert the word “all” into those beliefs we might be able to declare a ceasefire on many of the fronts where we are furiously fighting. It simply requires us to support all freedom of speech rights, and to deplore all hate speech.

If you’re a student of clichés, as I am, you’ll be familiar with the great free speech cliché: “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”, falsely attributed to Voltaire. This is the whip with which free speech absolutists flagellate themselves. It is also the inscription written on the monument atop which the Free Speech Union has raised its flag.

I’m a supporter of the Free Speech Union for practical, ideological and temperamental reasons. The practical reasons are obvious: I’m a writer and don’t want restrictions placed on what I write. The ideological reasons reside in my belief that contradictory opinions are essential to the process of determining the truth of a matter. The temperamental reasons can be summed up by my declaration that “I’ll not remain silent as to truths or opinions in order for one person to avoid discomfort when faced with a truth or opinion they dislike”. That’s my excuse when people accuse me of being a rude bastard.

Last night I went to an event staged by the Free Speech Union to debate “Whether New Zealanders in public roles are still allowed political opinions”. The interviewee was Rob Campbell, currently the Chancellor of Auckland University of Technology where students are absolutely forbidden to speak freely if they want that piece of paper at graduation. The interviewer was Ani O’Brien, an FSU board member and columnist who, for reasons known only to herself, feels it essential to leaven every statement she makes with the gratuitous reminder that she is a lesbian. (Well, good for you Ani but what bloody difference does that make? Your battle is won.)

Mr Campbell’s phone number is in the contacts list of every lazy knee-jerk journalist wanting an opinion with an opposing view to an initiative floated by someone who is guilty of occasionally wearing a tie. So his voice is heard often. He’d studied economics as a youth but quickly became a loud trade unionist of the “all employers are bastards” variety whipping up the “them-and-us” fever that best pulls in union fees. Overflowing with opinions which required little effort to accurately predict, he made sure to express them forcefully enough to ensure they didn’t go unheard. This quality got his phone number into the contact lists of public service department heads also, for use whenever they needed someone to sit on a quango, enquiry committee or ministry board where someone was required who didn’t sound like a public servant but could be relied upon to advance the political objectives of public servants. It’s a skill that has seen him never out of work or out of the news, and has led to his being invited onto private sector boards also, where I imagine his bombastic style brings an exciting frisson to the table, particularly when HR discussions are on the agenda.

It was his experience working both sides of the fence, private sector as well as public sector, that made me keen to hear him address the loaded question posed by Miss O’Brien on behalf of the FSU and I brought along a question of my own.

We learned from the opening salvo that our Rob was a fierce defender of his rights to free speech and he thrust his chin at the audience to make sure we damn well got the message. As “independent” Chair of the Board of the Ministry of Health he’d just as staunchly defended the rights of others, too; a right that extended, for example, to nurses’ and doctors’ associations to expel members who expressed views politically unacceptable to the people who ran those associations and to bar them from employment. Hospital staff unions requiring members to distribute anti-government pre-election campaign leaflets to patients in their hospital beds were clear examples of free speech, and staff who did not want to do so simply did not understand democracy. As Rob pointed out, the most effective unions were those where democracy was most pronounced; that is, where the majority prevailed and dissent was silenced.

Though Ani relied throughout the night on the second half of the FSU mantra to defend “...your right to say it” there was no pushback, even when an audience member had the temerity to suggest that medical care should be dispensed equally on the basis of need, rather than by ethnic prioritising, and asked what Rob’s response would be. Rob rose momentarily from his chair, pointed at the questioner and replied that he would call him a foul person and, if he was close enough, punch him. I do like a person with strong opinions.

Eventually the entertainment returned to the theme for the evening, which is what interested me: are public sector employees allowed political opinions? Well, of course they are, Rob opined but, more importantly, they should act according to their beliefs. There was nothing more spineless in his book than people who acquiesced.

There went my evening. I had come to hear his views in respect to public versus private sector compliance expectations. As an example I would site the situation in a private sector corporation where the board wished to avail itself of fast-track legislation to obtain resource consent without the need to negotiate ransom money with Maori iwis for their approval that might take years. One executive director, however, holding strong views about the desirability of co-governance might express his opposition. Assuming his opposition was in the minority, two things would happen. Firstly, he would be allowed to explain his view and argue his case. Secondly, he would not be placed in charge of advancing the fast-track application on behalf of the company.

My question to Robbo was to be: “In the public service is it the view that freedom of action should follow from freedom of speech, permitting officials to not only express their opposition to government objectives but to work against them; or should they declare their conflicts of interest and step aside from decisions and advice as they would need to in the private sector?”

I anticipated having to flesh this out for the avoidance of doubt in the room, by stressing that the public sector in Wellington — as in Washington and Westminster — overwhelmingly votes for socialist policies and obstructs non-socialist governments. But our Burnham-like interviewee had already answered the question leaving no doubt at all in any of our minds. His answer would be a resounding “No. They should not step aside.” But he needed to impress on us that he was a staunch defender of free speech, in case anyone doubted it, and he knew better than anyone what that was.1

There was another reason I attended the meeting last night. An Auckland City councillor named Julie Fairey had campaigned against the event being held at a council owned venue, which she described as a “Proud Centre” and “a safe space for our queer community”. Her outrage was based on the fact that our Ani of the FSU had expressed her contempt for the transgender thugs who’d beaten up women in Albert Park who had assembled to discuss women’s rights. Julie Fairey (whose signature includes the immortal line “Transwomen are Women and Trans Rights are Human Rights”) described Ani as a transphobic bigot and called for supporters to picket the event and close it down. I waited until the end of proceedings and they failed to show, further spoiling my evening as I’d wanted to ask Councillor Fairey if she was a woman (she/her) and however she replied my supplementary question was going to be, “How do you know?”.

On reflection later that night I concluded that supporting free speech is a bit like encouraging defence spending. We’ll never win the war, but it makes us feel better for trying.

A.I. Fabler

July 30, 2026

My rising 3-year-old grandson is coming to stay next week, and I have a duty to show that I can see the world, at least partly, as he sees it. Which is that everything is greeted with high expectation, if not amazement, and with the shiny light of newness. Dinosaurs are hilarious and must be named accordingly; ice creams falling on the carpet have a magic ability to be replaced by new ones; and falling over while trying to kick a football is so funny that it needs to be repeated. Adults can occasionally respond in the same manner to these events, but usually it requires the assistance of alcohol or the primary psychoactive compound found in the cannabis plant. The exception would be the Argentinian football team who believe that falling over while trying to kick a football requires that they be awarded a penalty.

Thus it is that I am observing the arrival of Manchester’s Andy Burnham to 10 Downing Street with the fresh, expectant eyes of a 3-year-old. Andy is a man of the people (as are we all, I suppose). To remind us of this fact he intends to eschew the wearing of suits and ties in favour of polo shirts, anoraks and sneakers whenever possible. This is pretty much what I wear on a windy, wet day in Spring also, so I have no trouble imagining Andy as my neighbour from across the street popping over on a Saturday night for a barbeque. “Come on in, Andy. No need to take your sneakers off. Help yourself to a beer and come and help me with the sausages. Do you prefer beef or pork?” I wouldn’t spoil the evening by asking about policies, or anything awkward and overtly political like that: Andy has read the nation’s room and knows perfectly well that policies are a real dampener.

He’s made watching television fun again, too. If you managed to catch his arrival speech outside Downing Street last weekend, you’ll know what I mean. “I will soon go through that door behind me,” he said, “and issue my first instruction: to end rough sleeping in our country.” Although rough sleepers mostly don’t have television sets it is to be hoped they were watching on their smart phones and have obeyed the instruction as asked, particularly in Manchester. I say Manchester because the last time he gave this instruction was when he was elected mayor in 2017, since when the number of rough sleepers in that city has doubled.

There was a lot to like in his speech last week. He promised to govern as “authentic Labour” on behalf of “ordinary working people”, which is encouraging for those of us who feel minorities need to be looked after, for there is no minority as deserving as working people in today’s United Kingdom.

He has also promised to split his time equally between London and Manchester, taking his own staff backwards and forwards each week and establishing a “Number 10 of the North”. “We’ll take the power back from Westminster and Whitehall and give it to the place where you live”, which raised jubilant cries of “Allahu Akbar” in the immigrant populations of Birmingham, Slough, Bradford and Cheetham. This shows great thoughtfulness towards Westminster and Whitehall people, too, who will be able to get on with the business of running the country without being constantly disturbed. Manchester is clearly the place where he feels most at home. After 8-years in office he left the city just £1.34 billion in debt which compares favourably with the £109 billion debt in which Keir Starmer left the country. So he owes a debt to Manchester, and Manchester owes a debt to the bankers.

But enough of all that. The United States had good news for us last week, thanks to Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War. He’s announced that all combat troops are to be tested for their testosterone levels. High means in and Low means out. Liberal lads and ladies think this is going to result in oversexed marines wanting to fight everybody. God forbid! But there’s some good news that they’re missing. It means that men transitioning to women won’t have to go to Syria and face ISIS terrorists. They can go to Portland and fight with ICE officers instead, while women taking testosterone to transition to men can up their dosage and get sent to Damascus.

Look on the bright side, I say.

Last Sunday we saw two of the world’s biggest sporting events reach their climax. In the football World Cup Spain and Argentina faced off for a place in history. Spain play a beautiful, intelligent form of the game but for some reason the Argentinians thought they were fighting a war. It was as if they’d raided Pete Hegseth’s testosterone warehouse. Photos were published showing the players running around the field after finishing a game against England holding a banner that read Las Malvinas son Argentinas (The Falklands are Argentine). The last time they fought a war over this claim was 1982, when Margaret Thatcher was the British Prime Minister and the UK had airborne marines who knew how to fight and a navy that had a submarine big enough to sink an Argentine battleship, causing The Sun newspaper to triumphantly headline its front page “GOTCHA!”. Nowadays, of course, the UK doesn’t have an army or a navy and willingly gives away islands without even being asked, so there’s no need to be aggressive about it.

The second great sporting event last Sunday was the final day of the 2026 British Open golf championship at Royal Birkdale Golf Club. The winner of the tournament is officially known by the title “The Champion Golfer of the Year”. The numbers who play golf worldwide is arguably as great as those who compete on football pitches. It is a game which is excruciatingly hard to play well. There are two opponents to overcome: the golf course and yourself. The last player to step up to the tee in the last round on the last day at Royal Birkdale faced a hole that hardly anyone had played in less than four shots. If this player made it in four, he would be tied for the championship and go into a sudden death play-off. If he shot it in three, he would win the greatest prize of his life; but there was a real risk that he’d end up with five or over and lose the championship. So, what did he do?

He turned to his caddie and said, “We’re going to take it on, and if I stuff up it’s on me.”

He then hit two of the most perfect shots ever played and walked onto the green facing an eleven-foot putt and surrounded by an enormous, hushed crowd. His adrenaline was pumping and his hands were shaking but he wasted no time, stepped up and hit it. The ball wound its way over the undulations of the green and dropped into the hole. The crowd roared and he raised his arms in triumph and relief.

That young man was a New Zealander, Ryan Fox, and millions back home raised their arms in triumph with him. His prize was $5.5m and a place in history, but his real triumph was having the courage to accept that being a true champion requires a willingness to risk it all.

That’s the bright side, and I hardly needed to go looking for it, thanks to Foxy. When my little 3-year-old arrives next week, I won’t go shopping with him for a football; I’ll see what’s the smallest size golf club we can find.

A.I. Fabler

July 26, 2026

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It seems that ill will and resentments are carried at differing levels by all of us and expressing them openly is inhibited by the desire to be seen as agreeable in social situations. How we express ourselves in private to partners or close friends is very different from how we express ourselves publicly — except for the afore mentioned political polls and social media, where there are no consequences.

The death of actor Sam Neill this week showed that benevolence and courtesy can be stronger assets than malevolence and discourtesy. It isn’t often that a person is so strongly remembered for those qualities that no one is tempted to go looking for any word or action from him that might even slightly undermine their view of him. I didn’t know the man myself, but I have never heard eulogies that focus so completely on the universal agreement that Sam was the most likable of men. Being a well-known actor was almost incidental it seems, though we all know how unpleasant many actors can be off-screen.

On the same day that he died a political poll was published in New Zealand that prompted me to consider this issue about the license polls provide for exposing resentments rather than support. With a general election just four months away we are going to be inflicted with multiple polls on a weekly basis, and they will be pored over by the media forensically until we scream silently to ourselves. I decided to get in early before the silent screaming becomes deafening.

I won’t be forensic in my analysis, or studiously unbiased, but I will, if you’ll let me, use the opportunity to explore this aspect of human nature.

The headline is that the governing centrist party, National, has 28.7% support and the opposition socialist party, Labour, has 34% support.

Labour is the party that subjected New Zealand to the world’s most repressive regime during the Covid-19 pandemic, destroying people’s lives, jobs, education and freedoms in the process and crippling the economy with debt. It also pushed legislation and public service policies towards the creation of co-governance with Maori, forcibly dividing the country. Its leader, Chris Hipkins, remains unable to define a woman, which prompted J.K. Rowling to remark, “In the interest of balance, someone should now ask women how they define Chris Hipkins”.

Labour has but one policy: it offers state support to as many voters as possible subject only to its ability to raise taxes and debt. This is its primary strength. Its secondary strength is that it does not lie about it.

National is the lead party in a coalition which includes both a left-of-centre and right-of-centre smaller party. In combination they represent a bell curve of conservatism with a dash of populism at one end, right wing conservatism at the other, and a preponderance of timid democratic socialism in the middle. The leader of the National Party, and current Prime Minister, is Christopher Luxon, who came to politics from a career as an executive and CEO in large corporations internationally. In the less than three years since this coalition has been in government its successes reflect the strengths of Luxon as a corporate manager and the failures reflect his weakness as a politician.

In addition to a raft of refinements to areas of existing legislation, the Coalition’s major successes include the hard-driving of significant trade treaties to successful completion; clearing (at least partly) obstacles to development and infrastructure consenting; restoring literacy and numeracy as education priorities with measured standards; focusing the police on youth crime reduction and gang visibility; and attempting to achieve modest targets for monetary policy reform, in tandem with a properly managed Reserve Bank. These are all objectives which no-one is embarrassed to support.

Its failures reflect the weaknesses of Luxon. He lacks political instinct and the need to have deep-seated beliefs, strong enough to overcome resistance from an entrenched left-wing bureaucracy. He and his party are also unaware that telling lies is a recognized political trait repeatedly overlooked by voters, but in telling lies it is unforgivable to show that you didn’t understand why they voted for you. That is why National sits at just 28.7% approval. People are expressing their resentment at being lied to in respect to promises they believe were made, or implied, about matters which they are hesitant to complain about openly.

It’s when I look at the reasons for resentment that I realize why it shows up in the polling. They relate to issues which people are inhibited from expressing openly because, by woke standards, they may be viewed as disagreeable.

Here are the issues that I believe the polls are reflecting while failing to identify them.

The Maori Issue:1

The promises included in the Coalition Agreements included:

• To uphold “the principles of liberal democracy, including equal citizenship, parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and property rights, especially with respect to interpreting the Treaty of Waitangi.”

• To “Remove co-governance from the delivery of public services. Ensure government contracts are awarded based on value, without racial discrimination. Ensure all public service departments have their primary name in English, except for those specifically related to Māori.”

• To “not advance policies that seek to ascribe different rights and responsibilities to New Zealanders on the basis of their race or ancestry”.

• Remove co-governance from the delivery of public services.

• Restore the right to local referendum on the establishment or ongoing use of Māori wards, including requiring a referendum on any wards established without referendum at the next Local Body elections.

• Amend the Waitangi Tribunal legislation to refocus the scope, purpose, and nature of its inquiries back to the original intent of that legislation.

• Stop all work on He Puapua.

• Confirm that the Coalition Government does not recognise the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as having any binding legal effect on New Zealand. (He Puapua)

Not only have these goals not been implemented, but every day further evidence emerges that the bureaucracy has either ignored directions or reinserted co-governance and racial privilege into legislation without resistance from the Coalition government. The same is occurring at local government level.

To vociferously protest these failures invites charges of Racism from the Racebaiters on the left. Hence resentment is expressed only via the polls.

Bureaucracy:2

The Public Service bureaucracy can be dismissed as an incorrigible joke (à la Yes Minister) or a suffocating weight on people’s daily lives and their attempts at making progress. More sinisterly, government employees’ view of themselves is that they comprise the government, rather than the people who have opportunistically found their way into Parliament.

Most people have experience of the ‘suffocating weight’ version and responded positively to the Coalition’s promises at the hustings that they would reign in the sector, “Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the public service and of government-funded services ... reducing Core Crown expenditure as a proportion of the overall economy”.

Here’s the reality:

• In 2017 (the year the last Labour government was elected) the core ministerial Public Service employed 47,252 full time employees.

• By 2023 (the year the last Labour government was overturned by the Coalition) it had risen to 63,117 employees.

• In March 2026 (after 2.5 years of Coalition government) that portion of the Public Service employed 64,535 full time employees. An increase of 1,418 in their time in office and an increase of 17,283 (36.6%) since National was last in office in 2017.

• NZ’s nationwide government in 2025 was 477,400 employees (including 59,700 local government employees) representing 19.5% of the country’s workforce.

• The Public Sector’s weekly earnings now average $2,060 with average ordinary time hourly earnings of $52.45. The average mean annual base salary in 2025 was $103,300.

• Compare that to Private Sector weekly average earnings of $1,255 or $41.89 per hour. The Private Sector average mean annual base salary in 2025 was $85,700.

• Public Sector salaries rose 21.4% in the 5 years to 2025 compared to 14.5% for the Private Sector.

• These figures do not include higher superannuation and redundancy schemes in the Public Sector or allow for the fact that a significant proportion of the Public Sector is contractually not required to attend the office more than two days per week.

Cause for voter resentment? You bet!

But who wants to loudly insist that 17,000 central government employees be fired — “cast out onto the streets!” — and Public Sector wages be frozen? No-one. So, they make their resentment known secretly in the polls.

Climate and Energy

When New Zealanders see their energy costs rising by 10% or more annually, and large industrial employers closing down on account of the costs, they can look to Europe and the UK where the impact on households and the economy is even greater. What do those countries have in common with New Zealand? They adhere to the Paris Climate Accord and to a Net Zero carbon emission target for 2050.

The physical reminders are visible on any car trip out of town. Productive farmland has been planted out in thousands of hectares of untended pine trees ostensibly earning ‘carbon credits’. Producer companies unable to operate with Net Zero emissions are forced to buy those carbon credits, adding to their costs.

But hold on. Why does Mr Luxon proudly commit the country to those pipe dream policies when all the largest economies (and emitters) have rejected them as having an unacceptable impact on living standards as well as being practically unachievable? He claims our international standing could otherwise be harmed. We can’t have that.

Of course, a vocal rejection by voters would cause them to be branded as ‘climate deniers’. We can’t have that either. Another reason for hiding open resentment.

These are three examples of why Luxon is being punished. There are others, like the failure to give recognition through the Covid Enquiry to the damage done by Hipkins, Ardern and company, allowing the hearings to turn into a whitewash. And, of course, there is the ever-rising increase in the cost of living, not all of which is controllable by government, but a lot is.

Few commentators have dwelled on the third largest group in the latest political poll. They were the 17% who were ‘Don’t Knows’ and the 3% margin of error.

Whether those resentments I have listed are carried over from the polls to the polling booths depends on whether Luxon moves forcefully to deliver on the Coalition promises (unlikely) or relies on the 17% swinging on the day towards timid centrism rather than unabashed socialism.

There’s a lesson for all politicians here I believe — Luxon, Albanese, Trump, Macron and Starmer (may he R.I.P.!). Pick your lies carefully. Some matter, some don’t.

A.I. Fabler

July 19, 2026

That’s how I felt this week reading excerpts from the preliminary hearing into the case against the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk. It wasn’t the content of the hearing itself that depressed me; it was the manner of the reporting by people intent on casting doubt on the nature of the killing and using the full powers of their language skills and media platforms to disparage the dead man and his family.

You might say that there is a simple solution to handling this style of so-called reportage; don’t read it or listen to it. But avoiding it in the first place is not easy, and treating it as being of no consequence leaves the field wide open for the crazed witlings to peddle their wares.

I saw Charlie Kirk on two occasions holding his Turning Point discussions with students on campus. Almost always the young people stepping up to the microphone in front of a supportive audience of left-leaning peers to state their views had steeled themselves in anticipation of being involved in a hostile argument. Without exception they stepped down from the microphone having felt fully heard and respected. His method was Socratic.

To say that Charlie was a conservative goes without saying. It also goes without saying that holding conversations with a massed assemblage of college students on their home territory could hardly be seen as preaching to the choir.

Having read some of his writing in Right Wing Revolution I can’t say that his ideas strike me as unusually insightful or even unusual. He had a good memory for facts and anecdotes to support his views, he was quick witted and articulate but, for the most part, he was an archetype of the God-Family-Nation conservative with old-fashioned values including courtesy and respect that stood out in one so young.

A lot of people who believe that the West needs to be protected from the ‘lethal ideology’ of wokeism claim that arguing against the left’s use of crude labels to silence discussion and invalidate contradictory views — think Racist, Nazi, Homophobic, Transphobic, Climate Denier, Sexist etcetera — merely plays into their hands because you are irredeemably all those things by not being one of Them.

Talking to racism Charlie wrote, “Cries of racism happen most of all when trying to make any kind of serious political change that threatens the domination of wokeness. Screaming ‘Racism’ is an all-purpose cudgel essential for the woke to both gain power and to keep it.” He went on to say, “Republicans never prove that they aren’t racist, because proving such a thing was never possible in the first place. The winning move against all this rhetorical sleight-of-hand? Recognise what it is, and more importantly, refuse to be manipulated. Instead, do the opposite. Show confidence and moral firmness.”

His comments to the charge of transphobia were similar. Essentially, don’t deny the charge because you are ordained to bear it unless you agree with transgenderism.

Essentially his advice was to put energy into acting not arguing which was, paradoxically, contrary to his successful approach to the campus Question and Answer debates in which he argued forcefully. I’m not sure I agree with him. I agree that the left has stolen emotive words in order to silence debate, but silence by conservatives is what has allowed the left to influence legislation and media bias without push-back.

The English conservative, Sir Roger Scrutton, put it like this: “The final result of the culture wars has been an enforced political correctness, by which the blasted landscape of art, history and literature is policed for the residual signs of racist, sexist, imperialist or colonialist ways of thinking.”

Another story this week that has left me hesitating to express my thoughts when to do so would be so depressingly repetitive as to warrant my remaining silent is the revelation that diversity schemes in British universities, corporations and public bodies have effectively eliminated white working-class males from admission in favour of ‘minorities’. What could I possibly say about this that would be new and/or have any influence whatsoever?

Then I happened on a couple of demographic reports about the make-up of the world’s population. Who are the world’s ‘minorities’? Well it seems that Europeans/Caucasians are very much a global minority at 6% - 10% by most calculations: half that of Black Africans and one-tenth of Asians. The numbers can be argued, but I have no confidence that pointing this out would change the minds of advocates for DEI preferencing or diminish their belief in the power of ‘Racism’ as an effective ad hominem, but I wonder whether being silent, as Charlie advised, is necessarily the right course of action.

The left’s strategy for achieving moral and political ascendency has relied on dividing society into competing lots defined by group identities which are in turn defined by their minority statuses and presumed victimhood. The perceived enemy is the straight white male. Enlisting language as a weapon was the genius move that shut down resistance. But conservatives have refused to learn the lesson. Why?

Compare it to modern warfare. The Russians had tanks and fighter jets. The Ukrainians quickly learned the lesson and fought back with drones. Now every nation is building its armed resistance around drones.

So this week I decided to do the same. I’m starting to compile a lexicon of words to take the fight to the enemy. People who cry ‘Racism’ at every opportunity will now be identified as ‘Racebaiters’. No room will be left for wasted argument or cowered silence. I’ll say it loud and say it often.

And speaking to the brainsick males whose perverted desire to identify as women has led us to accept their claim to be ‘Transwomen’ (and to undermine the rights and identity of actual women in the process) I have a new and more appropriate term — which anyone with experience of neutering troublesome dogs will understand. Henceforth you will be acknowledged as ‘Transbitches’. Enjoy it.

As the A-to-Z pages of the lexicon stretch open invitingly before me my mind is humming with ideas for new weaponry, both defensive and offensive. If only Charlie were alive I’d love to discuss them with him.

A.I. Fabler

July 12, 2026

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Right now most First World people are focussed on the Cost of Living, Sport and Entertainment, and the impacts of Immigration. Ask them to pick from a pollster’s list and they’ll add Health, Crime, Education and Welfare because, of course, they know those things matter. (Sadly, Family is never included on the pollsters’ list of options.)

But newsmakers and social commentators are preoccupied with a very different list: Politics (never ending but always changing), Gender Identity, Racism, Illegal Migration — and Entertainment and Sport, of course. The newsmakers write about them in the present, and the commentators tend to analyse what brought them to their present state. Occasionally commentators, including politicians, try and predict their future direction, but very few go on to provide achievable solutions to issues of concern. And you can’t blame them.

This quotation partly explains why:

“The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred; at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing; whence the besotting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles; “if only”, they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen”.”

So they conceal their real thoughts.

I’ll explain the identity of the politician who made this observation — and what happened to him — in a minute. Meanwhile, let me lay out the three most important issues of the time in First World countries as I see them, and dare to suggest how they will unfold.

1. The cost of living and family survival

Rises in household costs for wage earners and welfare recipients are remorseless and debilitating, threatening the morale and social stability of average families more than any other factor. Those costs rise in proportion to the growth in government.

Governments at all levels squander money without restraint or accountability and produce (as in GDP) nothing. Private enterprise (capitalism) sets prices according to what the customer is willing and able to pay and, subject to input costs, uses lower pricing to gain a competitive edge. Private enterprise goes out of business once the price reaches a level that the consumer is unable or unwilling to pay.

Bureaucracies, on the other hand, set prices solely on a cost-plus basis. Costs include waste, fraud, inefficiency, mandated employee remuneration increases, essential service monopolies, inflation (money supply and interest rates) and — the big one —taxation. Taxation is the bottomless gold mine that allows cost-plus charging to work and government to expand.

There is nothing in this formula which will ever allow incomes to grow faster than costs, thereby closing the gap. So how will politicians deal with it?

The options are already in train, and different Western countries are at different stages along the track. My prediction is that it will evolve like this:

i. Increase welfare until the money and resolve to work runs out (i.e. more Socialism, as in all Western Democracies now)

ii. Redistribute wealth and seize private assets (i.e. much more Socialism, as in Mandani’s New York Democratic Socialists)

iii. Place the entire economy in the State’s hands (Communism as in China, but ultimately under global control)

iv. Maintain totalitarian control until people can’t be suppressed any longer (If it failed under Stalin that’s just because it wasn’t done right!)

v. After the inevitable revolt and collapse into violence, start again, as so often in the past.

That’s what lies ahead. It tends to follow a 100 to 150 year timeline.

2. Transgender Activism: Playing at God being the ultimate mental delusion

When Mary Godwin (who married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) was 18 she spent a long gloomy weekend talking about ghosts, vampires, life and death with a group of other young impressionable students and poets. She recounts waking from a nightmarish dream the next day in which she envisioned a pale student kneeling beside a creature he had assembled and animated from stolen body parts in his laboratory. The nightmare became the plot for a novel named after the imaginary student, Victor Frankenstein.

Mary’s own life was characterised by feelings of abandonment, loss, grieving and guilt, and she was not emotionally stable. On the other hand she was not uniquely cursed with instability and might have grown out of it if she hadn’t hung out with Shelley and his poet mates like Lord Byron. The novel, Frankenstein, is a cautionary tale and a horror story about the evils of Playing at God.

Another story of the evils of Playing at God is the true story, more recent, of Dr Josef Mengele. He was the SS doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp who selected prisoners, particularly children, for brutal medical “experiments” involving sterilization with chemicals, X-rays, or surgery; injecting them with experimental substances; and various organ removals and physical and mental tortures. None of his “experiments” were legitimate science but rather torture disguised as research, by a depraved and sick person for whom the victims were disposable.

From this account I think you can divine my opinion about Trans Activism and its supporters. Dare I suggest how this sickness will evolve and can it be cured?

The person who I quoted above also wrote: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” Anyone who has lost a family member to a dystopian cult knows that waiting it out and standing firm (with love) eventually sees the madness pass. I can’t predict the timeline, but Trans Activism will eventually become a shameful memory.

3. The invasion and destruction of Western Democracies

If you have chosen not to regard the invasion of your First World country and the destruction of its national identity as a reality, let alone a problem, then you will either be ready with excuses for it, or you will see it as desirable. Among the excuses for accepting it is the belief that multiculturalism and eradication of national borders will result in One World in which everyone will be related and at peace, governed by a benign and informed government with wholly egalitarian instincts. Good luck with that one.

You may consider that mass immigration is karma, in the sense of retribution for past sins like colonialism, racism and the need for reparations. Hating yourself for the imagined sins of forebears is very fashionable. For it to work you need to have the ability to be unable to see the sins of those to whom you are surrendering the moral summit. You need to abjure their misogyny, racism, violence, and bloodlust for your death as being excusable compared to your own evil which is so deep that it cannot be forgiven!

I’ve recently heard people explaining the rising domination of sectarian politics in areas of North America, Europe, the UK and Australia as being due to the emancipation of Third World peoples. Phrased as “Third-Worldism”, this is a version of the anti-colonial explanation but with the additional caché that it has its source in more recent events in 20th Century Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America, rather than relying on unverifiable events of centuries past.

Think of the Algerian fight for independence from France in the 1950s/60s; the partition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh by the British in 1947; the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952; the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965; and, of course, the partition of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947. All those Third World peoples deserve to enjoy the rights and privileges of the First World countries who came and went from them, goes the storyline; so now let us into their countries.

The irony is that they’re already in and thousands more are arriving every day. Their allegiance is not to the country they fled to, however, it is to the culture and identity of the country they chose to leave. The identity and culture of the western democracies subsumed by these invasions has been altered for all time in the space of 60 years and we are left with two questions: was it foreseeable, and is it reversible?

The person I quoted above predicted in a 1968 speech that Britain’s non-white immigrant families would reach approximately 10% of the population by the year 2000. He was wrong. The percentage reached was approximately 15% and by 2025 it was 35%. These figures do not include the accumulation of adult second-generation individuals from decades of migration. The proportion of children under 18 with at least one immigrant parent is estimated at 28%.

His solution was to stop further immigration and encourage and support repatriation before it was too late. Unfortunately, that point has been reached; it is now too late. The West lacks the will to resist and is surrendering its heritage. That is my conclusion.

In that same speech in 1968 that politician predicted that the Race Relations Act tabled that year would have as its starting premise that only one race could be presumed guilty:

“But while to the immigrant entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country... On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament: a law, which cannot and is not intended, to operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.”

For the calm and balanced exposition of the facts relating to the issue of British immigration, and for his prescient but understated projection of where it would lead, this shy and highly intelligent politician was dismissed from his cabinet position in the UK Government within 24 hours, pilloried and cancelled by the country’s media and elite, and his name could not be referenced in rational conversation for the next 40 years. To do so would to be accused of fascism and racism.

His name was Enoch Powell: politician, classical scholar, poet, soldier, and intellectually formidable opponent of the European Union, fascism, bureaucracy and restrictions on free speech.

Another quotation from that 1968 speech is: “All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”

It’s worthy of your reading.1

A.I. Fabler

June 2026

As far as we know, before about 1960 society dealt with the two afflictions without too much bother. The clever ones were sent to Academies of Science to ponder such questions as why an apple falls to the ground when it becomes detached from a tree, or why we don’t fall off the edge of the world when we sail to the horizon. The more effete ones were sent to Academies of Literature and the Arts where they whiled away their time learning to speak ancient Greek and composing odes to daffodils written in iambic pentameters (which, as we know, consist of five metric feet of alternating unstressed/stressed syllables).

The dumb ones were sent to muck out the stables or go man the trenches; both very valuable and necessary occupations.

The system worked. Most people existed in that vast middle ground where children are spawned, football is played and “common sense” is admired. The delineating lines separating off the very clever and the very dumb were not sufficiently clear, however, to stop some common sense people from falling asleep while trying to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or “Finnegan’s Wake”, for example, in order to prove they were clever; or, even worse, to prevent them from being so dumb as to believe that clever people were superior (a myth put about by the administrators of the academies when they realized that there was money to be made if the vast mass of common sense people could be persuaded to pay fees to attend their “universities”).

It is perhaps forgotten by many that the period post-World War Two saw the greatest advance in prosperity and materialism the western world had ever experienced. Food, housing and jobs were plentiful and universities put it about that the best jobs would be given to those young people who had proven they could sit around for three or four years listening to someone explaining the meaning of “Ulysses” or “Finnegan’s Wake” and getting a certificate for doing so.

What a successful new industry that turned out to be! This week it was announced that the annual “sticker price” per student for attendance at 16 US universities has passed USD100,000. For the parents of these over-grown infants it must be particularly galling that the most likely occupation awaiting their graduate child is that of barista.

None of this is intended to suggest that clever people have been driven out from these great schools of learning. The evidence of their existence persists, and I’ve been fortunate enough to become familiar with the ideas of a number of them. Take the recently deceased Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University as an example. Since the 1970 Treaty of Rome and the many “Earth Days” and climate conferences that it spawned over ensuing decades Ehrlich has been much quoted by the media and politicians on account of his erudite predictions including that the 1980s would see a “Great Die-Off” killing 4 billion people (including 65 million Americans) caused by over-population and starvation. Oceans would be “dead as Lake Erie” in a decade, and the US would have water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980 with life expectancy dropping to 42-49 years.

Well, he certainly caught our attention, and some envy from other eminent professors at esteemed universities who quickly joined the game. No-one wanted to be left out. As you may know, Acid Rain had a brief moment and then there was some flip-flopping between a predicted Ice Age and Global Warming, with the latter winning out decisively with the encouragement of the United Nations and strings being attached to the government funding on which universities rely.

One of my favorites is Professor Hans Joachim Schellenhuber of The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s top climate advisor and in October 2013 he predicted there would be an ocean heat belch “that would shock-heat the first ten kilometers of our atmosphere — the layer that we live in and where weather occurs — by 36 degrees Celsius”. In June 2015 Pope Francis appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

I strongly believe it is a breach of etiquette to belittle someone’s religious beliefs so I won’t use these unfortunate predictions to undermine your convictions about Global Warning, just as I wouldn’t suggest to Scientologists that L. Ron Hubbard, their founder, is unlikely to be returning to earth on the next appearance of Halley’s Comet in July 2061. However, I will make the point that choosing Carbon Dioxide as the target for allegations of villainy shows that those universities really do contain some clever people.

The beauty of global warming is that the matter is not resolvable, or provable, in our lifetimes. You may believe that not eating meat, killing cows and bicycling to work will drop the world’s mean temperature by 4.4 degrees by 2099 but it is becoming an increasingly hard line to hold. What you can agree on, however, is that the more people there are, and the more they use energy to fuel their industries and lifestyles, the more carbon dioxide will be produced. So, drastically reducing one or the other will surely make the difference.

Another clever German, the economist Joseph Schumpeter, famously said that “Capitalism pays the people that strive to bring it down”, by which he meant the clever people at universities who almost without exception rely on being avowed anti-capitalists in order to gain attention. One of the better-known academic socialists, adored by the likes of the New York Times, is Thomas Piketty, the French professor from the Paris School of Economics and the London School of Economics who has caught our attention this month with the publication of the “Global Justice Report”. The joint product of 45 international “experts” and 250 academic researchers, this is the handbook for which we have been waiting, finally closing the circle on population, global warming and capitalism, the three greatest threats to mankind and therefore the three-cornered hat of socialism. (Author’s note: the three-cornered hat, formally known as a tricorne in Europe, is historically referred to as a cocked hat.)

Here are some highlights:

· Fast decarbonisation by freezing Gross Domestic Production (GDP) and ultimately reducing it by slashing consumption patterns, food habits and land use. A Net Zero advance in economic activity from today’s position, simultaneously ensuring Net Zero carbon emission.

· Redistributing wealth equally across all nations and peoples, which will stabilize and ultimately decrease population growth.

· A global socioeconomic system controlling material and monetary accounting.

· Establishment of a World Sovereign Fund and Global Justice Fund financed from the world’s capital stock, equivalent to 60% of the world’s GDP.

· Global wealth and income taxes including 20% for billionaires and rising to 90% at the very top.

· A new international order under the umbrella of the Global Justice Fund.

A trial of these ideas is already underway in the UK under the Net Zero policies of the Socialist Energy Minister, Ed Milliband, and it is already proving to be highly successful after just two years, with the UK’s economy advancing backwards at an ever-increasing rate.

Clever people always come up with clever ideas.

However, I don’t believe you need to be academically clever to find a solution to the world’s problems, you just need common sense and the support of the media and governing elite. This was demonstrated to me by a friend using a paper napkin in a lunchtime restaurant and the calculator app on an iPhone.

‘Do you realize,’ he asked, ‘that when we exhale, the carbon dioxide content of our breath has increased a hundredfold from when we inhaled? We take an average of 12 breaths per minute and 17,280 breaths per 24 hours with a total volume of 8,640,000 milliliters. Of which 4.5% is exhaled as carbon dioxide. Do the maths,’ he said, so I did.

Sure enough, in a year each one of us exhales 141,912 liters of carbon dioxide, which weighs 183.6 kilograms per 100,000 liters. Who would have thought?

By my friend’s calculation a population drop of three billion people would reduce the world’s carbon dioxide load by 781.65 million tons per annum, enough to allow us to start using fossil fuels again. Certainly, three billion people is a lot to eliminate from the global population ... but the benefits are plain to see. Personally, I’d start with everyone who has blue or purple hair and wears a nose ring. They can be found in droves on every university campus.

The problem with this common sense solution is that it wouldn’t have the support of the media and government elites. But Paul Ehrlich would have loved it.

A.I. Fabler

June 21, 2026

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Of all the exchanges we have with our fellow human beings nothing is so easily misunderstood as attempts at humour.

I had an appointment with my cardiologist this week. She is a very nice woman, about the same age as my daughter, and American.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

‘Oh, fine,’ I joked. ‘Apart from incontinence, dementia and an inability to walk in a straight line I’m a box of birds. But what can you expect after sepsis?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she replied. ‘I’ll schedule an appointment with our gerontologist. She can talk you through late life problems. She might even be able to see you this week.’

I took a deep breath and straightened the sleeves of my new linen jacket.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ I answered, ‘but I’m rather busy this week, having my apartment redecorated: new furniture, new paintings, a completely new look. Then I’m off to Australia to catch up with my grandchildren before flying down south while the ski season is still in full flow.’

She looked at me in complete bafflement and then began typing in the case notes on her computer screen. I decided not to push the joke further in case she took it as a sign of early-onset madness. Instead I asked her how her parents were doing (New England Democrats I’d surmised) while the Straits of Hormuz were closed, and was she planning on joining them for President Trump’s 250-year celebrations.

It would be fair to say that this was rather tactless on my part. Whether it was the mention of the name Trump, or the invasion of her personal life by asking after her parents, it was clear that I had crossed an invisible line. Retreating from a failed attempt at humour is always difficult and I can’t profess to know how to do it.

I think it was Ricky Gervais who said that the minute you need to explain a joke it ceases to be funny. And the one I like most is from Charlie Chaplin who said that life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.

The upshot of my appointment with my cardiologist was that we agreed to meet again in six months’ time. All being well.

... and it isn’t as we imagine.

The person I imagine myself to be doesn’t exist and never will. He is over six feet tall, charming but reserved, moving languidly through life without ever expending energy on things that can’t be changed. Confident that he knows himself well, he is nevertheless genuinely interested in others, finding enough in the banality of their lives to conclude that it is the sum of all people that reveals the meaning of life.

Yes, this self-confidence may make him appear arrogant, but hypocrisy is a greater sin. Besides, he affects a self-deprecating sense of humour that is capable of disarming hostility from others when needed. Ambitious? Competitive? Not particularly. The only opponent he recognises is himself and his fatalistic tendency to view the world as a faintly laughable, pre-ordained cosmic joke.

I don’t know why I choose to imagine myself this way because the person I imagine is an insufferable, arrogant prick. Perhaps there is something in all of us that would like to be able to get away with that — being an insufferable, arrogant prick — because it would be so liberating. Instead, we expend all our energy trying to pretend we are not the person we secretly imagine ourselves to be.

My God, it’s hard work.

Sometimes the sourdough fails to rise.

Our memories are extraordinary things when they choose to be. I was thinking this the other day when I suddenly recalled what life was like pre-Wegovy.

Do you remember? For years we tortured ourselves masochistically with diets that didn’t work. The one I hated the most (apart from Paleo) was the BBB Diet in which we had to ensure that not one morsel of Bread, Beer or Botatoes passed our lips.

Such is the power of societal shaming that we never acknowledged that those three things had been humankind’s staples for centuries. In fact they pre-dated obesity by three or four millennia. Once the fashion for consuming them again replaced the fashion for avoiding them, we began to be swamped by boutique breweries, farmers’ markets and artisan bread makers. Celebrity bakers, brewers and organic farmers pushed celebrity winemakers and chefs into (for them) an uncomfortable state of irrelevance.

But within any new fashion there is always one star that rises above all others. The bread making star is, of course, sourdough. People will drive for miles through heavy traffic to secure their favoured loaf before it sells out each day. I am particularly fortunate because I have a celebrity baker within walking distance. I’ll avoid naming him/her/they so that I can speak frankly about the speed with which $8 loaves became $10 and $12 without blinking.

I should reveal that up until now I had nothing to contribute to conversations about sourdough but owing to an event two or three weeks ago I am now overflowing with little tidbits, as you will see. It began one Saturday morning when I made my way to the bakery shortly after 8:00 am. As I walked in I was assailed by the yeasty aromas of freshly baked loaves being shovelled onto their wooden racks straight from the oven. I ordered my usual Pioneer loaf and asked that it be sliced, as usual. Half those slices would go into the freezer, and half would sit on the kitchen bench to be consumed with duck liver paté or Gorgonzola over the next few days.

While waiting for my loaf I consumed a pain au raisin. Then I became aware of a kerfuffle at the slicing machine. The young person serving me approached with an embarrassed, not to say crestfallen face.

‘I’m terribly sorry, sir,’ she pleaded, ‘but the bread is so fresh — and soft — that when the slicing machine grips it the loaf is flattened out of shape. Would you consider taking it unsliced?’

I suppose I could have suggested that I come back in an hour or two when the crust had firmed up sufficiently, but I had a paternal sympathy for her embarrassment and told her that I would happily slice it myself in good time. Early that afternoon I took out my breadknife and made a start. It was surprisingly difficult to get a slice of even thickness. The task was harder than I ever imagined. Then I recalled overhearing a sourdough conversation in which someone said, ‘Oh yes, you must always use a breadknife with a very strong handle and broad serrations.’

Luckily I have a specialist kitchenware shop, also within walking distance, and when I asked for a sourdough breadknife the owner knew exactly what I needed. It wasn’t easy getting it just right, but I finished the task and bagged up my freezer supply despite the slices being at least twice the size of the desirable thickness.

Then I looked at the fresh slices lying on my breadboard and thought, ‘Hang on, what’s going on here?’ I knew the signs of a good sourdough were the holes formed in the inner loaf due to the fermentation that takes place inside the dough, but it appeared to me that the bread I’d bought was at least 50% air. Perhaps it was the mood I was in after my exertions, but I gathered up my slices and marched down to the bakery to complain. When I got there my resolve collapsed.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ the nice young salesperson asked.

“Yes, I was wondering if you could tell me what is the best time to buy a fresh loaf so it’s able to go through the slicing machine.’

‘Around 10:30 to 11:00,’ she replied. ‘Providing we haven’t sold out.’

If only she hadn’t said that last bit.

‘Damnit,’ I said to myself, ‘surely it can’t be too hard to bake my own.’

I won’t bore you with the details concerning the next few days except to say that 20 hours sourcing supplies; waiting days for starters to ferment and dough to proof; mistiming the oven temperature; cleaning up the mess; and finally getting a solid brick of indigestible, unsliceable foreign matter at the end of it, makes $12 for an artisan loaf from the local shop seem remarkably cheap. My only consolation is that I can now contribute volumes to sourdough conversations, even with strangers.

Now, finally, I would just like to say a brief word about making homemade pasta.

If you are tempted to buy one of those fancy Italian pasta-making machines by all means do so, but please follow this advice. At the end of your horror two weeks place the machine out on your kitchen bench in clear view for when guests arrive. As soon as a guest cries delightedly that you’re so lucky and how envious they are, keep your reply brief.

Say, “It’s yours.”

A.I. Fabler

June 13, 2026

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That’s the problem that economists face — human behaviour — but I’m yet to meet one who’s honest enough to say, “I don’t know”. That would be the end of conversation.

Last week I wandered out of my zone and asked, in respect to the rise in national and private debt worldwide, “Who is the lender, and why is the debt allowed to inexplicably rise without being called in?”

My mistake was in assuming that I’d find the answer at the likes of the IMF, the World Bank or even those AIs who must have scraped every word written on the subject in the last hundred years. Their explanations suggested they were laughing at me. “Wrong question, sunshine,” is what they should have replied.

This rather reminds me of the first time I went looking for an explanation of quantum physics. The answer I was given was that Max Planck, a physicist, got stuck on a problem around 120 years ago about the nature of radiation. In order to proceed he decided to create a mathematical trick to explain the inexplicable, claiming that radiation came in the form of packets of quanta of a certain size. Quantum physicists have been using the same trick for 125 years to explain things like determinism. There is a well-worn trick that hucksters like me use to give themselves credibility, which is to quote others whose reputations have been well established. Let me, therefore, quote Stephen Hawking: “Although quantum mechanics has been around for seventy years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated by those who use it to do calculations.”

Precisely! And so it is with economics.

If I started recounting all the facts I’ve gleaned regarding government and private debt, its horrendous size and the identity of the people who issue it (and how and why) you would likely stop reading and turn your attention to today’s memes on your cell phone instead. Truth is, we’ve built a wall in our brains to protect ourselves from this subject. “What,” you might proclaim, “are you telling me that the money I borrow from the bank at great cost didn’t exist until I asked for it?” Or maybe, “Are you saying that the nations who owe most to the IMF and World Bank are the nations who own the IMF and World Bank? Is that why they never have to pay it back?”

Yes, I am. But that’s just a small part of the answer, and we don’t know what to do about it or where it’s all heading.

So I posed the question to Donald Melville Smythe, an outcast economist and self-confessed sceptic of orthodox financial theory writing in The Financial Times in April 2039¹. He allowed me to quote freely.

‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘an economist’s job was to analyze and comment on the financial management of a country and its resources. Little by little, the complexity of that subject grew, until practitioners like me began to realize that the moving parts were so varied, the hidden parts so uncertain, no one should pretend to have the answers about what brought us to our current position or where we are headed.

‘After such an admission on my part, you would be entitled to wonder why I don’t just finish this article here and now. We are in the throes of the greatest disruption to society since the three revolutions of the twentieth century; do you really want to hear from an economist? Probably not … except that the people implementing this disruption claim that the “Moment has come to repair the damage caused by the collapse of the world economy”—and the world economy is what I’ve been talking about for half my life.

‘So, at the risk of being a jackass, I’m going to do it one more time.

‘Where to start? Well, the economy is based on money, so that’s where I’ll start.

‘Money had its origins in ancient Egypt, Babylon, and India in the form of clay tokens, allowing people to overcome the limitations of barter. In local marketplaces, they were a simple solution to an obvious problem. Then metal coins were introduced, representing a given value of staple commodities that could be exchanged. But ultimately, the further that money became dissociated from a given commodity, the more its value and status came to rely upon a consensus agreement by the people of the society in which it circulated. This is a key point, as we shall see.

‘Gradually, money began to be used to facilitate trading with people in other countries also. At this point, the value ascribed to the money by the issuing country had to be trusted by the recipient, as did the ability of the issuing country to honor it.

‘Now, this raises two obvious questions: who determined the value of a coin, and who manufactured and issued the coins?

‘Enter gold and silver. From the earliest times, these two metals were judged to be valuable, and that value was relatively easy to assess on the basis of weight and purity. So, sovereign states started minting coins made from these two precious metals. (Sovereign states are called that because someone—a sovereign or a governing body — rules over them.)

‘So, gold and silver coins had an easily calculable value—that is, until a sovereign started fiddling with the system by cutting back on the amount of precious metal in the coins and asserting that they had a “face value” rather than an intrinsic value. This was an unsubtle way of introducing a tax in favor of the sovereign, at the expense of the people holding the currency—i.e., the tax was the difference between the face value of the currency and the cost of producing and distributing it.

‘But what was “face value”? Well, ostensibly, it was the value of the actual gold or silver that would be received if you marched up to the sovereign’s place of business, presented your coin, and asked for payment. Of course, not many people had the balls to do this—or even thought to question whether the sovereign might be issuing a lot more coins than could ever be redeemed with the gold and silver he kept in the palace vault. However, to the merchants whose ships were sailing the world, filling their holds with exotic spices, silks, and slaves for sale to traders in other nations, this monetary system was too obviously flawed. What they wanted was a face value they could trust—and they found it in the London Goldsmiths. These trusted gentlemen accepted deposits of bullion from merchants for safekeeping and gave them certificates (promissory notes) in return. The certificates were then used as currency to make purchases. This was the start of banking, and the forerunner of the “gold standard”.

‘Pretty soon, history repeated itself: the London Goldsmiths started printing more certificates than they actually held in gold, and they “lent” these to borrowers in return for earning interest. As long as the people trusted the Goldsmiths’ integrity—and the depositors didn’t want all their bullion back at once—everything was fine. In essence, they had invented fractional-reserve banking (see below), and it wasn’t long before other people got in on the act, calling themselves “banks” and issuing banknotes as legal tender.

‘Well, the sovereigns didn’t like this at all; they quickly decided that the issuing of banknotes by private commercial banks had to stop. They believed that only banks controlled by the governing powers should have the right to issue money, and so they established their own “federal” banks for this purpose, run by the rich cronies on whose patronage they relied. The currencies they issued were representative money, supposedly backed by gold and silver held by the federal reserves.

‘Things went along fine for as long as the gold and silver reserves could be counted. But when one or two nations started printing more money than could be accounted for by the value of their bullion reserves, and other nations began insisting on swapping that money for gold as promised, things got a bit fractious.

‘In 1971, President Richard Nixon decided to remove the gold-backed guarantee from the US dollar. Apart from the fact that he was rapidly running out of gold at that time, he realized that the system constrained him from printing money whenever he felt the need.

‘Now, why would he feel the need? Well, printing money is how you pay for wars and government contracts, as well as the insatiable demands of big business and voters, who allow you to retain power … not to mention bailing out the commercial banks and financial institutions who have engaged in their own form of phantom money creation, and whose failure could tip over the financial markets unless the government comes to their aid. In addition, printing more money permits you to devalue all currency already in circulation, which inflates the price of assets, deflates the cost of debt, and is a far more effective way of taxing people than going after their wages. It is the government’s favorite form of theft, for it ultimately benefits the rich on whose patronage government relies.

‘But if money is no longer backed by gold, what is it actually worth? The US government says the dollar is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the US government. Other nations’ governments take a similar view. It’s akin to saying, “Don’t worry, we’re good for it.” But once a country is judged to no longer be “good for it,” lenders move in and take its assets. It happens to weak countries quite frequently. Who are these lenders? They’re the major international banks, investment funds, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—the latter two being syndicates formed by the leading trading nations, who are, by their own accounts, “good for it.”

‘So, what makes a country “good for it”? Put simply, it is the strength of its gross domestic product (GDP)—essentially, the wealth it creates—and the size of its debt relative to that GDP. Years ago, it was considered very dangerous for debt to exceed fifty percent of GDP. But then governments got the idea that they could go on printing money to solve all their problems and issue bonds that they would one day buy back, cancelling the debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio subsequently rose to one hundred percent, then to one hundred fifty percent, and finally now in 2039 to four hundred percent. That means that in today’s economy, it would take every dollar earned by everyone for four years just to pay off our debt. No money left for wages, food, utilities, military—nothing.

‘Well, of course that’s impossible; society would collapse.

‘Meanwhile, globalization, AI and automation have eliminated jobs and severely depressed wages, while costs have increased, asset prices have inflated, and health and retirement funding has dried up.

‘But these conditions aren’t unique just to our country; all the others are experiencing it, too. Surely, you ask, someone must have seen it coming?

‘Sure thing. We’ve seen it coming for years. We’ve been stuck in a tunnel with the freight train of recession and economic collapse bearing down on us full throttle. Dare I suggest that we jackass economists have been frantically pointing it out to anyone who would listen? But the Federal Reserve assured us that they had it in hand. By which they meant there was always the option of printing more money.

‘This is where we see the flaw in the system revealed. You see, money doesn’t resolve the problem of debt: money causes the problem of debt. And the clue lies in the “Fractional-Reserve Banking” game that I mentioned above.

‘Here’s how it works:

‘Banks don’t need a dollar of deposits or equity for every dollar they lend. Regulators allow them to hold only a fraction of their obligations as reserves or capital and lend out the rest. When a bank approves a $500,000 mortgage, it doesn’t move existing money — it creates new money by simultaneously:

§ Crediting the borrower’s account with $500,000 (a liability for the bank)

§ Recording a $500,000 mortgage on its books (an asset for the bank)

§ Banks can then package those mortgages into securities (MBS) and sell them off their balance sheet. This frees up capital to write more mortgages, effectively recycling the same equity multiple times.

‘See? The money doesn’t even exist, only the debt does. Clever, huh?

‘Now, one way of reducing the debt ratio is to increase GDP. Increasing government deficits was supposed to provide money for infrastructure and productive spending, thus raising GDP. It didn’t. Lowering the interest rates was supposed to stimulate consumer and business spending. It didn’t. Ever more desperate, governments introduced negative interest rates, so they could skim money off those who insisted on saving it. Cash was eliminated so that no one could hide it. Every digital transaction became visible; transaction taxes quickly followed.

‘It wasn’t enough. Perhaps it never was intended to be enough.

‘What is needed is a big bang solution, the World Government has finally said—and that solution is to CANCEL ALL DEBTS. Capitalism doesn’t work, they say, so it’s time to overthrow it. In reality, it’s just an old-fashioned JUBILEE, straight out of the Bible. You’ll find it in Leviticus, Isiah and Deuteronomy: “Every creditor must cancel debts owed ... there need be no poor people among you”.

‘Sound good? For most people, this is an easy sell: just wipe out all debts and start again. The assets stay with the lender, but the borrower is no longer in debt. Stocks and shares and private businesses of all sizes may be wiped out, but a new and more equitable system will take its place, with a Universal Basic Income for all. Everyone will finally be equal. Now, what could be more popular than that?

‘But, of course, there will never be a day when everyone is equal—not as long as we remain human. There will be no universal basic income needed by the elites in government who are creating this system, nor for the super-rich who are their sponsors. Wealth will continue to reward cronyism, self-interest, corruption, and barefaced theft with the same ingenuity it has displayed for millennia. If the worldwide pandemic of the 2020s taught us anything, it is that big business runs the world. Governments and bureaucracy are but its servants. And the poor proletariat, the victims of this great fraud, believing themselves to be unshackled at last from the fear of poverty and failure, will find themselves trapped in dependency, a vast underclass of serfs. What will the government do then to keep the lid on them?

‘Next week, I will tell you why I predict that the government sector will swell to become seventy percent or more of the economy, while unemployment will become a lifetime condition for half the adult population within ten years. I will show you how governments shrink wealth, not grow it—and how poverty, discrimination, and sedentary malaise will ultimately destroy the spirit of society. I will explain how creating deliberate divisions between people on the basis of competing identities consumes their energy and distracts them from the true cause of their dissatisfactions, suppressing rebellion against those in control of the deep state. Until then…’

Unfortunately, this article led to Smythe’s arrest and banishment to a Federal Re-Education Camp from which he is yet to emerge.

A.I. Fabler

June 7, 2026

From period pieces to contemporary action pics and predictably woke lessons on the moral superiority of racial and sexual minorities, the selection criteria for the festival organisers seems to be to provide something for everyone. Every leading actor appears to have won a César Award, and every film is either an Official or Audience Selection at Cannes, Venice or Toronto, but neither these things, nor glowing critical reviews, are protection against the feeling that taking potluck is the only method for choosing what to see.

The audiences are sparse and the demographic is definitely not hipster. Who is able to go to the movies at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning or 1:45 on a Monday afternoon? My impression is that (apart from me) it is overwhelmingly widowed or divorced women who remember their trip to Paris forty years ago as being the time when a charming stranger told them how alike they looked to Grace Kelly (or was it Audrey Hepburn?).

Of course, young people are not the slightest bit interested in foreign language films because the sub-titles are too hard to read on iPhones. Sub-titles are a bug bear of mine also. If you have even a fragile grip on the language, let alone fluency, it is almost impossible to stop yourself from reading the damn things and missing out completely on the nuances of what is being said.

It’s the same no matter what language is spoken in the original. I went to a Hollywood Western one day long ago in Paris, killing time. It was to be an action-packed affair that opened with John Wayne riding into town and being confronted on the steps of the saloon by a threatening sheriff. They glared at each other for a long, tense moment before John Wayne said “Howdy”. Up popped the sub-title in French saying “Bonjour monsieur. Comment ça va?” As I fought to control my giggles, the tension of the moment was lost.

The whole point of sitting in the dark in front of an enormous screen while surrounded by 100 decibels of sound is to immerse yourself in another world. Accepting that world as being in any way real is a voluntary process because it never is. Other than in the rare documentary, it is practically and creatively impossible for it to be real. There are times when its pretense at reality fails so obviously that my mind wanders down strange paths, and I find myself returning to the plot minutes after having missed the critical reveal.

Par example, I was watching a Belle Epoque drama the other day; 1890s, fabulous costumes, flamboyant manners, and arrogant entitled men in top hats dismounting from horse drawn carriages. ‘Hold on a sec,' I thought; ‘there’s something wrong with this scene.’ Then I recalled that before automobiles became widespread at the turn of the twentieth century, there were around 300,000 horses on the streets of London disgorging 1,000 tons of manure per day. In New York (much smaller) there were 200,000 at its peak, each producing 35 pounds of manure and 2 gallons of urine per day.

The movie showed cobble-stoned, paved roads with not a single drop of shit on them. In reality nearly all roads were bare earth at the time, and in wet weather manure mixed with dirt and urine to create “manure rivers”. In dry weather they created a choking dust that coated buildings, clothes and lungs. New York had an official Superintendent of Scavengers who paid a pittance to young boy sweepers to clear paths for pedestrians (hence ‘footpaths’). Vacant lots were turned into manure piles 40 to 60 feet high and London barges carried hay into the city, and manure back to the farms, until farms couldn’t handle the volumes.

Every city block had a shoeshine stand on the corner, and every house had a boot rack at the front door. Both sexes splashed perfume over themselves liberally to mask the stench.

Eventually the problem was solved, not by city officials, but by the invention of the internal combustion engine. The stables out the back of bourgeois houses were turned into bijou townhouses for the likes of Emma Thomson and Hugh Grant to conduct unreal stories of late twentieth century romance.

I have to admit that movies release a tendency in me that I struggle to restrain in daily life: I wallow secretly in the joy of being an acerbic critic. ‘That doesn’t work,’ I’ll tell myself. ‘Why didn’t they ask me? If I can see it clearly, why can’t the bloody screenwriter and director see it?’ So when I went to the French movie Cycle of Time the other night it didn’t stand a chance.

Described as a “time travel subversive comedy, seeing the present though the eyes of two characters from a bygone era” the creators had the bright idea of catapulting a conventional 1958 couple into 2025, allegedly to explore (or expose?) the radical changes in societal roles and technology. It’s a theme that Jaques Tati (Mon Oncle) could have made into a classic. Even Benny Hill would have done it well, if he could have brought himself to stop winking at the camera all the time. Also Steve Martin, and certainly Peter Sellers. It was not a theme that the team who made Cycle of Time were equipped to handle.

Leaving aside the mistaken belief that slapstick equates to comedy, the creators got the story the wrong way round. It is not the present that is cause for satirical evaluation, it is the past. Take a young family from 2025 and dump them into 1958, without cell phones, internet, fast food, contraceptive pills and Instagram and they’d collapse into catatonic shock. For those of us who remember, 1958 was conducted entirely in black and white. They didn’t show that in their movie. ‘If only they’d asked me,’ I thought.

But then came a scene that made me sit up as if a hospital bed alarm had gone off. The wife came home (in 2025) giddy with excitement and clutching an arms-full of high-end shopping bags. The husband looked shocked and bemused as she pulled out a little blue plastic card from her bag and held it triumphantly aloft. Let me tell it to you in the form of a sub-title: “It’s extraordinary. You just put it into a machine and money comes out”.

Off went my critical mind again. ‘No,’ I thought, ‘money doesn’t come out anymore; that’s the problem. They’re doing away with money faster than we all realise. What comes out is debt.’ The mid-century economist John Kenneth Galbraith posited that one third of the world’s money doesn’t exist. I’ve thought about this often as today’s economic commentators, media and politicians warn of the Armageddon that lies in wait for us as our national debts rise ever higher and higher.

I suspect that Galbraith was only partly right. The figure is much higher, and I believe that debt and money are now not even the same thing. How else could it be that the average US household owes $602,200 in government and private debt, with an annual interest bill of $17,500? In the UK the average household debt in US dollar terms is $331,000, with an annual interest cost of $11,500. In Australia the figures are $348,300 and $12,500 p.a. interest; and in New Zealand $383,500 and $11,800 p.a.. Compare those figures to the annual household incomes.

The obvious question is: Who is the lender, and why is the debt allowed to inexplicably rise without being called in? Thanks to that scene in the Cycle of Time involving the little blue credit card, I’ve decided to spend the week trying to find out, in between catching a French movie or two.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

A.I. Fabler

30 May 2026

Of course it was not perfect; the British themselves would have acknowledged that. Class division, snobbery, a tacit acceptance of racism, and a condescending attitude to people whose countries and cultures were insufficiently strong to resist the “benign benefits” of being colonised were evident for all to see. But in the pantheon of nations during recent centuries Britain stood tall.

Having to watch in recent weeks the incompetence of the headless chickens who run the country you may be thinking that Britain’s decline has reached its nadir. Perhaps you view the current stasis in the UK Government as an opportunity. It can only get better from here, you’ll say, because it can’t get worse. That would be the good news.

But if you believe its decline has been so gradual and prolonged that it is destined to get much, much worse and is now irreversible, that’s the bad news. In this view its destiny is to become the charnel house where western civilization’s bones will be buried. (Charnel houses are used to house bones unearthed during the digging of new graves, to make room for those yet to die. Britain is long dead but there are many countries in the West who will soon follow, is the view.)

These conflicting views depend on your sense of history: the long or the short versions. Here are two examples:

In recent history, Germany was defeated militarily, socially and economically twice within 30 years. A proud, civilized nation was carpet bombed into near oblivion, reduced to wearing rags and eating rats. Within another 30 years it had become the economic powerhouse of Europe. The short-term view of history, therefore, contends that hitting the bottom is a necessary springboard for bouncing back to the top.

Imagine the view of an omnipotent being, however, seeing history from a long-term view. The Roman Empire, for instance, lasted around 500 years and fell quickly for rather familiar reasons, never to be revived:

• Barbarian invasions and migrations

• Economic collapse, hyperinflation, and heavy taxation

• Military decay and over-reliance on mercenaries

• Political instability and weak leadership

• Division of the empire

Sounds a lot like Britain, doesn’t it? The omnipotent being’s long-term view might well be that Britain’s condition is terminal, therefore.

Managing editors of newspapers used to give cub reporters the job of writing obituaries for notable citizens, as an exercise to test the cub reporters’ skills. The obituaries were written in advance of the citizens’ deaths — sometimes years in advance — and were pulled out from the filing cabinet when they died, then updated quickly overnight for publication the next day.

I hesitate to write Britain’s obituary this week, but I do feel the need to make a start on it, even if I’m not around to finish it off before final publication. Here’s my draft.

In Memoriam

Britain was a once proud nation that died from self-inflicted wounds suffered over a period of approximately 80 years during which it lost its sense of purpose and identity following the effort of fighting a debilitating war. The causes of death were three-fold.

Welfarism

Prior to the 1939-1945 War Britain was built on a rigid class structure. The Upper Class governed and owned everything; the Middle Class aspired to join the Upper Class and willingly managed things for it; and the Lower Class (euphemistically called the Working Class) did what it was told. Although universal suffrage existed there was a tacit understanding that the purpose of democracy was to keep this class structure in perpetual balance. The war, however, upset that balance by throwing people of all classes together, thereby exposing the reality that ability, intelligence and fortitude were classless. Suddenly democracy was not about maintaining the status quo but about redressing the imbalances in society.

The weaknesses of democracy are well known, but the greatest weakness of all is the reliance on one-man-one-vote mandates in order to govern. To get elected, politicians must say and do what they think a majority of voters want. Between politicians this becomes a contest. A well-proven tactic is to offer succour and support to voters using the money extracted from them by way of taxes. This is almost fool proof as a means of gaining votes. The misty-eyed call it social justice. The realists call it welfarism. And Britain is a world leader in it, having reached the point where it is handing out more than it takes in taxes, and borrowing desperately against the day when the music stops playing. That day has come.

Multiculturism

One response to the deprivations and cruelty of that same war was the conclusion that many quite intelligent and humanitarian people reached, that wars could be prevented if nationalism could be eradicated and this could best be achieved by demolishing national borders, allowing free migration from poor countries to rich ones, and from oppressive regimes to benign ones, and establishing a universal governance structure run by qualified technocrats. Support for this idea came strongly from bankers and large corporations who saw enormous economic benefits in terms of the freedom to transfer money, manufacturing, labour resources and tax benefits freely on a global scale (Globalisation).

Support also came from the burgeoning post-war political classes who, disappointed by the poor results from Marxism (but still enamoured with its shibboleths) saw welfarism as a tool for implementing the social equity goals that gave them a sense of purpose and moral virtue. Reducing inequality, they calculated, could be achieved by eliminating nationalism and cultural dominance first (promoting Multiculturalism) before then addressing other causes of inequality such as race, gender and religion. For those people for whom feelings were the primary political motivator it became swiftly rewarding to be able to identify new victims deserving of largesse and, conversely, groups of oppressors who could be deemed responsible. The rewards were immediate. Diversity became the tool by which inequalities could be identified and corrected. The adverse consequences were no more than theoretical and lay far off in the future.

What could go wrong?

Sectarianism

Utopian ideals are easy to design and satisfying to express but when they founder it is because people themselves are too damn stubborn to behave as they should. Nationality, culture and religion evolved over thousands of years in response to the millions of choices groups of people made to arrive at those things which defined them. Race is genetic and sex is biological. So-called negative traits in humanity such as prejudices and phobias are products of our evolution, which cannot be legislated away at a stroke.

So all the sorting of people into classes by race, religion, culture and sex in order to make a single amalgam under the banner of multiculturalism caused people to balk and hold more dearly to that quality which defined their personal identity. “You want me to accept multiculturalism,” the invaded nations started to think, “but you insist that I despise and reject my own culture.”

Meanwhile the invaders were not prepared to give up their cultures and religions either. They were what defined them, and they preferred to live alongside those who shared their cultures and religions, rather than be effectively robbed of their identity by assimilation into the culture and religion of the host country. So they bunkered down in their new countries in familial and religious tribal groupings in order to defend themselves and promote their own interests. Democracy with its inherent weaknesses was an easy system to manipulate in their favour. Thus Sectarianism took hold in politics and social life.

Every Western country is at some point along this path, but Britain is the most advanced. What we are witnessing currently will not be halted, let alone reversed, by the emergence of a new leader or a Damascene conversion in the political classes. There is still some sign of life in the British people, but it is only a faint stirring. The lesson is that diversity is not a strength, unity is.

So, please hold this obituary for a little while but keep it handy.

A.I. Fabler

May 16, 2026

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Some years later, as a young adult working in England I was helping finish off a display in support of an International Maritime Law event at London’s Earls Court. We were rushing to finish the job with raised hammers, wet glue and teetering step ladders when suddenly the opening time was announced with an ear-splitting rendition of “God Save the Queen”. All around me tools were dropped and people leaped to their feet, heads high and hands at side, while this tape-recorded dirge rang out in the cavernous hall. All except me, who found the thing totally absurd. The Queen at the time was probably at Balmoral riding her horse or whistling for her corgis.

It transpired that my low-level defiance had been observed by an older man who advanced upon me with his fist raised high in what I presumed was Royalist outrage. But no, he wanted to congratulate my action and embrace me for it. Turns out he was the representative of an Italian ship making yard, a trade unionist and staunch member of the Italian Communist Party. Despite my modest confession that I had no strongly held views about monarchy and was only displaying a youthful tendency towards anti-establishmentism he insisted on offering me a lifetime membership of the party and a standing invitation to visit Trieste.

For the next few years I would receive my monthly copy of the Italian version of The Morning Star, which of course I couldn’t read, nor could I cancel (as newspapers came by post in those days). Eventually I moved from my £5 a week Kensington flat to something resembling a house in Fulham and my mail failed to follow. Hopefully it was marked Restituisci al mittente - Return to Sender and he got the message that I was not a candidate.

The anthem ritual has progressively lost its standing (excuse the pun) over the last few decades, and in the old British colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada it is the local version that’s now played, and only at international sports events. Regrettably, new insidious rituals have taken hold. In New Zealand these take two forms: the first is the waiata and the second is the haka, both being traditional forms of Maori expression but, in their current contexts, not as originally expressed.

To get a feeling for the sound of a waiata I would suggest you listen to Lucia’s Mad Scene (”Il dolce suono”) from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor sung by the likes of Maria Callas or Joan Sutherland. In this scene (Act III), Lucia has just murdered her unloved husband on their wedding night. Staggering on stage covered in blood, hallucinating her true love Edgardo, she performs a long coloratura aria that alternates between despair and unhinged ecstasy, ending with her collapsing and dying. Apparently workers at the Ministry of Business and Economic Development (MBIE) in Wellington are unable to commence work until they have engaged in a performance of this for one hour each morning. I was surprised to learn that Ministry employees actually turned up for work each morning, as the Public Service Association tells them they needn’t.

All public entities in New Zealand are enamoured with the frequent performance of waiatas, particularly by State School children. Only the haka exceeds it for ubiquity and international recognition. The haka, I should explain, is a ritual greeting, originally performed by men only, in which they address strangers by poking out their tongues, rolling their eyes and stamping their feet while shouting a welcome which loosely translates as “I’m going to gauge out your eyes, cut your throat, and eat you”. It used to be performed only at major sporting events, but it’s now performed whenever a school bus finally arrives, or a foreign dignitary has stepped off a plane.

Back in my day there was a reticence to perform the haka except on important occasions, or when one was drunk. I remember having dinner at a Restaurant avec Chambres in Burgundy once when the chef discovered I was from New Zealand. This brought him out of the kitchen for an enthusiastic embrace and with a bottle of Vin du Pays in each hand. It turned out that he played rugby league in the front row against “Les Kiwis” and had the fondest memory of the experience, as well as of the haka, which we performed at 2:00 am on the tabletop for the edification of all present. The tabletop wasn’t made for front row forwards and collapsed after our storming performance proved too much for it, but we became friends for life (which, in his case, was predictably short).

I regret to say that there is a prissy, virtue-signalling side to many New Zealanders who have caught a self-flagellating guilt for their colonising ancestors, and this manifests itself as ludicrous knee-bending to Maori “culture” whenever the opportunity presents itself. This behaviour is divisive, and resentment of it may be one of the country’s dirty little secrets. (These things happen when you overdo something.)

Australia, however, is the Lucky Country and I’d long believed it had escaped this sort of nonsense. How wrong can one be? Someone in a university social engineering department at the turn of the century brewed up a toxic blend of white guilt, atonement and moral purity which takes the form of a po-faced liturgy that’s required to be spouted whenever a group of any size gathers to open an event, a building, or a car door. It is a vacuous, and mostly insincere, acknowledgment of the indigenous people who may, theoretically, have lived thereabouts in the distant past where this ritual is now being performed. It is referred to as the Welcome to Country address.

The address is now performed on every public and private occasion in Australia, including television game shows, bring-a-plate barbeques and baby showers. It lasts three to ten times longer than the haka, but way less than a government department waiata.

Now, although the indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Island people amount to just 0.7% of the population I think it is very nice to remember them and show good old Aussie mateship, but I fear that the country has started to go down the path of its New Zealand neighbour and this habit has become divisive, building resentment. It may already be one of the country’s dirty little secrets. In Sydney and Melbourne last month crowds of 50,000 and more gathered at dawn on ANZAC Day to show respect for those who have fought and lost their lives in war. It is a solemn occasion that has been taken up and revered by successive generations since 1916. This year, however, the solemnity was marred by loud heckling and booing at the beginning of the Welcome to Country address.

Canada, as you can probably guess, has abandoned rationality entirely. Anyone who doesn’t want to be pilloried when daring to speak in public needs to keep a list of indigenous tribes handy at all times unless they miss someone out — and be careful when spouting their eulogy as to whether they start with the English version or the French (both are required but knowing which one to use first is like playing Russian Roulette). Jordan Peterson exhausted himself trying to repair the broken psyche of his countrymen who were unable to emotionally cope with this issue, but he ultimately gave up. Thankfully the government introduced a free medically assisted suicide service to put people out of their misery, and it is now the single largest cause of death for Canadians.

These things happen when you overdo something.

I wonder if it might be better to just say, ‘Welcome.’

A.I. Fabler

May 9, 2026

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To use the Australian vernacular, “It was a bloody good decision, mate”.

Let me quote the introduction to Peter Craven’s Spectator review:

“Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is the most celebrated of all Australian plays; and this story of the two cane cutters who for seventeen years have come from Queensland to take it easy with their lady loves Olive and Nancy took the world by storm. It was the first time (back in 1955) that Australian accents were heard around the country and then round the world. The 1955 Doll is a winner, a beautifully orchestrated depiction of two mates, celebrating the pull of their long-term seasonal relationships, symbolised by Roo’s annual gift to Olive of a Kewpie doll. The play itself — as its title suggests — is closer to Tennessee Williams than you might at first think in its depiction of the desolation and the camaraderie of working-class life in Fifties Melbourne and the history of the Doll saga is complicated and enriched by the fact that Ray Lawler in the 1970s was encouraged by John Sumner (the original director of The Doll and the founding head of the Melbourne Theatre Company) to write two prequels to The Doll: Kid Stakes set in 1937 (and recapitulating the shadow of the Depression) and Other Times set in 1945 at the end of the second world war. These two plays and The Doll that culminates them are a suite of dramas of extraordinary richness and Red Stitch (ensemble theatre group) has chosen to stage all three plays together. The continuous version of the whole box and dice runs with intervals from midday to nearly 11 p.m.. It is an extraordinary dramatic feast ...”

As you will notice: three plays in one day. If you had a short attention span, this was not for you. My companion and I had seats in the front row where we could literally trip the actors up if we inadvertently stretched our legs. As the critic described The Doll Trilogy, it came across as “... a miracle of dramatic realisation that it is impossible to imagine bettered and difficult to imagine equalled.”

The language, behaviour and social mores of the characters as they progressed over 17 years from the late Depression to the Post-World War Two demobbing of the men, made this such a period piece that I was startled by the realisation of the enormity of change that has occurred in Australian society since then. Ironically, the long-standing relationship of the lovers in The Doll Trilogy collapsed when they were confronted by the prospect of their five-months-on/seven-months-off routine changing to one of permanency. But it was the far-distant nature of the characters that shocked me. These were white Australians living in a world that has completely disappeared.

It had been 20 years since I’d last been in Melbourne and I left the theatre realising that it was now as foreign to me as a fabricated metaverse. Kid Stakes and Other Times were written in the Seventies and in my imagination Australia had remained fixed in that time. Over the next few days I was forced to examine the current reality of this cosmopolitan city of 5 million people.

Australia, and Melbourne in particular, is on the cusp of becoming an Asian country. The visual evidence on the streets is overwhelming. The statistical evidence supports it. Five years ago 49.3% of the population had parents who were both born overseas, predominantly from China and India. English was spoken at home by only 61% of people. Among those Chinese born overseas just 37% had taken up citizenship. In the five years since, immigration has expanded exponentially and these numbers will be greatly increased in the 2026 census.

During the decade when Ray Lawler was writing his prequels to The Doll there was a growing confidence among people that racism had been defeated, first by MLK’s anti-segregation movement in the US, then by the laws making interracial marriage illegal being finally outlawed in 1967, and then by Australia’s abandonment of the White Australia Policy (which had been intentionally designed to restrict non-European — especially Asian — immigration and maintain a predominantly white, British-descended population since 1901). Many people proudly proclaimed at the time that they were “colour blind” and racism was now dead. In the new utopian future miscegenation would see the races inter-marry until eventually a melange would be created that would render the concept of race extinct. In the late seventies we sang to Abba’s song The Name of the Game by altering the lyrics to: “Miscegenation is the name of the game, and each generation will play the same”.

That utopian belief quickly unravelled. “Miscegenation” was soon tarred by connotations of negative eugenics and “Multi-Culturalism” ascended hand-in-hand with “Open Borders”. Which is where we are today.

As for racism, well that has been reborn stronger than ever, thanks to progressive identitarianism which insists that individuals be judged according to the group to which they belong, and that groups be identified by the level at which they stand as victims of those who oppress them. Race has become the strongest of all identifiers. Being White is to be simultaneously oppressor and victim.

There’s no point in being nostalgic for the period of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. It wasn’t better, but it was easier to understand. A supporting character in The Doll was an educated Austrian Jewish refugee who had been interred throughout the war as an Alien. He was treated with distrust and antipathy by the two leading males but quietly went on to marry one of the two leading females. His part was played to perfection by an Indian actor.

And, if you’re concerned about our ability to survive a trilogy that ran over eleven hours, I should explain that we had a two-hour dinner break in which we went to a recently opened restaurant run by a newly arrived Ukrainian refugee family. The Ukrainian menu was unintelligible to us, but the food was delicious and the family was charming. That’s multi-culturalism for you.

A.I. Fabler

April 28, 2026

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“It is the honourable thing to do”

Following a directive from The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the British Government is said to be drawing up a comprehensive plan to deal with the rising levels of criticism and political unrest over its handling of status and identity issues besetting residents in the UK.

The plan, under the working title “Abject Surrender”, is to be in response to the ECHR ruling reported this week that visas be granted to migrants from 112 countries – including Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, India and the Palestinian territories – under the scheme granting visas to Ukrainians seeking sanctuary from the war with Russia.

It is believed that the Prime Minister has said that this ruling confirms his party’s view that migrants may choose their ethnicity and country of origin as a human right.

A Downing Street source reports him having said to his Cabinet that “We in the Labour Party have steadfastly held to the belief that people may choose their gender as of right, and this decision confirms that those rights extend to all aspects of identity. I steadfastly believe that all caring progressives like myself will embrace this opportunity to redress our mistakes of the past and bury once-and-for-all the stigma of racism, colonialism, militarism and slave trading of which the British people have been guilty. It is time to act boldly and decisively and the course of action we are taking at this time is the honourable thing to do.”

It is understood that a ten-point action plan could be drawn up by a special advisory group (S.A.G.) to include Zack Polanski, Leader of the Green Party; Lord Hermer, prominent Human Rights lawyer and Attorney General; Imam Anjam Choudary, the leading Islamic cleric; and Owen Jones, the highly regarded left wing commentator from The Guardian newspaper.

While the draft plan is under strict media embargo it is believed to contain policy proposals addressing ten key areas of concern:

1. Nationalism. Described as “a pernicious cancer in Britain which threatens and belittles those many minorities who cannot claim British ancestry”, nationalism is often confused with jingoism. Therefore the word “Great” is likely to be uncoupled from the word “Britain”, and it would be a punishable offense to display either the Union Jack or flag of St. George. The National Trust may be instructed to change its name to the People’s Trust and Rule Britannia will be removed from the BBC playlist. (Note: this has already been done). The ongoing elimination of British history from educational curriculums will be accelerated for completion within two years.

2. Devolution and Democracy. Lord Hermer has been quoted as saying that “universal suffrage has led only to universal suffering”, and that “democracy is oppression of minorities by the majority”. This shines a light on the suitability of the outdated Westminster system. Parliament may be moved to Birmingham in order to be closer to the people it serves, and electorates would be abolished, with constituency MPs replaced by a Governorship appointed by elite experts drawn from Whitehall. Local Government Councils may also be replaced with community representatives drawn from the Teachers’ and NHS Workers’ Unions and local charities (COMREPS).

3. Income Support. A Universal Wage is being considered for all people unable to work owing to depression, anxiety, autism, ADHD, physical disability or employment phobia. This wage would be set initially at 85% of the average worker’s income, rising to 98% over two years. It is proposed that all private industry wages be capped at £80,000 pa maximum and thereafter personal tax be payable at 90% of earnings. There will be no cap on public sector wages.

4. Reparations. All banks and privately owned businesses employing more than 5 staff will be required under this plan to sign their assets over to an Exchequer Trust to be administered by the Bank of England (to be renamed the Bank of Social Equity). The Exchequer Trust will accept claims for reparation from all countries who believe they have experienced oppression from this country in the last 500 years (excepting the Jewish State of Israel). The Prime Minister is reported as having said “It is a small price to pay.”

5. Law and Order. The Supreme Court would become subservient to the new International Court of Diversity and Inclusion, being considered by working parties from the United Nations and European Commission. Sharia Law could be applied at the discretion of local COMREPS, or when requested by the accused. Free Speech is to be properly defined as anything acceptable to the Governorship, and all other speech will be deemed Hateful and punishable by prison terms ranging from 3 to 10 years as is curretly the case. Jury trials will be abolished.

6. Religion. Freedom to practice religion of choice will be universally available with the proviso that it does not breach the laws applying to Nationalism. It is understood that the Church of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury is considering undergoing transition to non-binary gender status and adopting the title of Imam Al Kantab. Public spaces, including Trafalgar Square, will be designated as Musallas or Musjids and be available for daily prayers. It is suggested that Westminster Abbey be renamed Non-Denomination Hall, and all churches become Mosqurches in order to avoid offence.

7. Military. The statement attributed to Jeremy Corban that “Armed Forces are created for the sole purpose of killing people” has been adopted by S.A.G. which is asking that all branches of the armed services be disarmed within six months. If any naval vessel is still at sea it is to return to port and be converted to an immigrant hostel. All fighter aircraft should be grounded, and their parts recycled for use in windmills. The remains of the Army would be required to surrender its weapons and stand down. Service personnel could then be re-allocated to volunteer service in countries designated by the United Nations as facing famine.

8. The Monarchy. It is understood from Palace insiders that King Charles has been consulted on the proposed plan and says it is what his mother would have wanted. He added “I look forward to calling palace staff to attend the Windsor Mosqurch for early morning prayer with those joyous words ‘Hayya ‘alal falah’ — ‘come to salvation’.” The Princess of Wales is rumoured to be having a burqa designed by Alexander McQueen for the occasion.

9. Assisted Living. Old age (68 years plus), infirmity and unwanted births are to receive special attention with revised laws to allow mercy killing and full-term abortion based on the Canadian model. Guilt counseling will be offered free to next of kin.

10. Dogs. In a most controversial move, it is proposed that canine pets be eliminated in order to satisfy the sensitivities of certain religious groups who find them offensive. The exception would be for dogs bred for culinary purposes as required in customary Asian dishes. Dog abattoirs will need to be established by COMREPS in all areas and failure to surrender pets might be punishable under Sharia Law.

Lack of consensus among S.A.G. members has meant that views strongly held by some will not appear in the first draft of the “Abject Surrender” plan. Among these are thought to be demands by Imam Anjam Choudary that all people identifying as female should be ordered to stay indoors until chadors and burqas can be distributed, and that females aged 5 to 13 years entering cousin marriages be exempted from female circumcision.

When asked for comment on the plan, Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party, said only that he is urgently setting up a Government in Exile based in Florida.

CAUTION: The proposals outlined in this report include suppositions by your correspondent based on actions and statements recently made by the UK Labour Government and they remain subject to final confirmation by the Prime Minister’s Office. Readers with additional information about the likely contents of the plan are encouraged to leave them in Comments below.

A.I. Fabler

April 16,2026

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We take our clues from those with whom we wish to identify, accepting their judgment in respect to right and wrong. It is a very rare individual whose own sense of right and wrong is strong enough to reject that which the tribe espouses when the consequences of doing so are inevitably rejection by the crowd.

Morals are like manners; they need to be learned. And just like manners, it seems they can be abandoned when society forms a consensus that they are no longer relevant or appropriate. In Judaeo/Christian cultures the concepts of good and evil are rooted in the Bible, a 2,000-year-old book that is essentially a collection of metaphors explaining the consequences of good and bad behavior: a handbook for survival, if you will, in an age when members of roaming tribes needed to be on the same page for the good of all. As society changed and tribes eventually settled, forming nation states, the biblical strictures around behavior continued to be upheld by a combination of family and church.

While there are some pretty gruesome passages in that book, the overall theme is that bad things await bad behavior, and good things are a reward in themselves. What are bad behaviors? Well, chief among them are killing, stealing, lying, adultery and not honoring your family; with good behavior summarized as “doing unto others as you would wish to be done to you”. (That’s the strap line for Christianity.)

The individual has personal responsibility for adhering to these values, and for some there is the potential for spiritual satisfaction depending on the strength of their faith in the existence of a beneficent Jesus Christ and God. That spiritual satisfaction fills an emotional need, while having boundaries around behavior gives a sense of security and social cohesion. Punishment for serious transgressions is promised in the afterlife, as are rewards. But there are also punishments and rewards in the lives being lived on Earth, which come from the approval or disapproval of the family and wider society.

We all know that family and church ceased being strong influences on people in western Judaeo/Christian countries when secular liberalism began pushing them aside in the 20th Century. One of the features of secular liberalism is the presumption that the blank-slate individual will have benign instincts that don’t require instilling by family or church. This is a very convenient presumption for activists of all stripes who have agendas of their own and are in a position to write on those blank slates.

But what does secular liberalism do to satisfy emotional needs and provide a sense of security and social cohesion? It deliberately destroys belief in a beneficent God, thereby removing the possibility of satisfying the spiritual needs that faith provides. It also dismantles the concepts of right and wrong that underpin Christianity, replacing them with a new core belief structure which maintains that the rights and wrongs of society are due to imbalances in power; in every situation there is a victim and an oppressor. Virtue lies in supporting the victim (good) and undermining the oppressor (bad). Confidence in correctly identifying the victim from the oppressor is achieved through membership of a like-minded tribe. Seen through this lens it is easy, necessary even, to constantly be identifying people outside the tribe as bad. In place of faith in God, spiritual needs are satisfied by the strength of feeling that can be engendered through the hatred of the bad and the concomitant glory in one’s own virtue.

Not surprisingly, secular liberalism has morphed into left wing progressivism over two to three generations and is now characterized by intolerance of all people outside the far-left tribe and increasing antagonism and violence towards them. Having convinced themselves that their anger is virtuous and justified, it is now viewed by them as righteous and self-affirming. A new religion has been created, with no after-life or higher being, focused on the immediate here and now.

Which brings us to the third religion and the book that has a stranglehold on the behavior and morality of its followers: the Quran. Here again is a handbook for mediaeval tribes laying down the rules. This book differs from the bible in that it was written approximately 600 years later, drawing heavily on the Old Testament after being filtered through the mind of a tribal chief who was very good at leading raiding parties to kill and expropriate from people who were not part of his tribe. His name was Mohammad, and he claimed his pronouncements represented the words of Allah transmitted to him via the Angel Gabriel. His followers are now called Muslims, and the religion to which they belong is called Islam, an Arabic word meaning “peace, purity, submission and obedience to the will of Almighty God”.

The Quran’s rules for behavior are very different to those espoused in the Christian bible. They include absolute commandments — no questions asked — that believers are to kill any non-believers who fail to convert to this religion; the extermination of all Jews; and the use by any means possible to ensure that the Islamic faith conquers the world. Only by so doing will Muslims find a place in Heaven.

Family and church (mosques) are enjoined to promote and uphold Islamic beliefs with no limits placed on the severity of their methods. The ardent practitioner is unable to demonstrate faith without regarding hatred for non-believers as its ultimate expression. In that respect it has something in common with left wing progressivism, which the two groups have come to recognize.

These are just very broad brushstrokes on my behalf to illustrate the setting in which hatred for others has been unleashed as never before in our history. Hatred has not only become acceptable, but it is also regarded as a righteous act. And there is one hatred that carries the load for all other suppressed hatreds. It is, of course, anti-Semitism. The anti-Semite has, first and foremost, chosen hate in its impassioned form. Many have taken on this attitude towards Jews merely to seem to be somebody of like mind to their associates. In targeting Jews in particular they are gathering up all their fears and hatreds into one single bundle agreed upon by their tribe. “... they are of bad faith and delight in it, for them it is a question not of persuading by good arguments but of intimidating or disorienting.... If the anti-Semite is, as everyone has been able to observe, impermeable to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong; but rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen in the first place to be impenetrable.” (Sartre, Portrait de l’antisémite.)

It is relatively easy to identify a problem; it is less easy to identify its causes, which makes it extremely hard to solve. A good friend of mine is adamant that we need to accept the biblical explanation regarding the existence of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’. There is goodness in mankind, and there is evil in mankind. Given encouragement and permission, evil doesn’t hesitate to reveal itself. There is no doubt in my mind that Islam and left-wing progressivism provide both encouragement and permission.

But how to solve it? It requires the leaders of wider western society to make it clear that expression of hatred and violence is unacceptable and to make it punishable. Words and wagging fingers from politicians, police, the judiciary and media will not do it. If there is insufficient belief in the need to act, then we will have to accept that what Islam and the far-left want will be given. We are getting ever closer to that point.

‘If not the Jews, then who?’ I asked in my beginning. As Pastor Martin Niemoller wrote:

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Whether you’re secular or religious, please speak out while you can.

Happy Easter!

A.I. Fabler

April 3, 2026

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But one other feature of the times is how we have latched onto some words and given them newly discovered meaning. One such word is ‘existential’.

(As an aside, I must tell you about my recent discovery of a new species of freshwater shrimp that can change its sex from male to female at will. How modern is that? No, it’s not called a Transhrimp, it’s called a Paratya Curvirostis and I discovered it while reading an extremely dry book on botany.)

Back to my word of the week, ‘existential’. I have previously tried to demonstrate that the removal of this word from any sentence does not in any way change the sentence’s meaning. On the other hand, I acknowledge that its inclusion does undeniably add gravitas to the sentence. For this reason I have been using the word often recently, hoping it will reveal some recognisable meaning that demands its inclusion. Imagine my pleasure therefore when I came across a copy of Jean Paul Sartre’s L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1946) in my library while browsing for some bedtime reading to clear my path to ‘a good night’s sleep’.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I read Sartre in French, for that would make his work essentially unintelligible to me. No, I read it in translation, which makes it only mildly less unintelligible, and I openly admit that I have An Introduction to Existentialism (1948) published by the University of Chicago Press to tell me what the hell he meant.

For context, let me describe the circumstances at the time. I had finished reading Lenin in his Own Words and Quotations of the Anarchists and needed an escape from binge watching Yellowstone and Industry on television when I came across the award-winning series The Pitt, set in the emergency department of the Pittsburgh Hospital. A review described it as ‘an existential drama’, so I was compelled to watch.

A tendency to be fatalistic about life and death, and medical matters generally, may make me sound flippant. I recall an occasion during the Covid pandemic when a woman friend expressed awe and sympathy for Jacinda Arden and the weight she was carrying on her shoulders saving the lives of all New Zealanders. In response I opined that the best way to take the weight off her shoulders would be to remove her head. (I haven’t heard from my friend since, and it’s been 5 years.)

Nevertheless, as a frequent visitor to emergency departments in recent years I have a proprietorial attitude towards them. Part of the attraction is recognising many of the symptoms patients are manifesting, and part of it is accurately predicting the treatment they will be offered. There are many other highlights of this show that I could mention. For instance the skilful casting that has managed to find a space for every single race and nationality in the world, and the portrayal of the lead doctor as a man who, in any other environment with similar stress levels would be a candidate for emergency treatment himself.

Needless to say, the fact that the majority of Americans are unable to afford Medicare or insurance is front and centre in this ‘existential’ drama and we are left in no doubt that ‘upstairs’ hospital management, cold-hearted insurance companies, and the ‘they/them’ of the country’s elite are squarely to blame. But if you want to know where the world’s saints are hiding, they’re up to their armpits in blood and guts, exhaustion and insulting levels of underpayment in the ED ward of The Pitt.

No time for sleep, no time for sex; that’s the right show for me I thought. I’ll binge watch it until an hour before bedtime. Well, it’s like watching a hamster on a treadmill with no way of slowing down or getting off. Not only is the pace relentless, each trauma being swept aside by a new and greater one arriving every two or three minutes, but the camera close-ups of fingers and scalpels penetrating open wounds quickly inure one to horror or pity. Bodies cease to be people and become merely soft-tissue objects.

Jean Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism, as far as I was able to understand it at 2:00 a.m. in the morning, is that existence precedes essence. This means that humans first exist — we are thrown into the world without any pre-defined purpose, nature, or blueprint (as ‘soft tissue objects’) — and only afterwards do we define ourselves through our choices, actions, and projects.

In short, Sartre’s existentialism emphasizes one’s responsibility for one’s life, and the absence of any given meaning — or essence — until we create it through our choices (for which we bear complete responsibility, with no excuses).

So how did the adjective ‘existential’ suddenly become the most over-used word in media, such that The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the NYT and BBC cannot express themselves without including it? In their worlds now there is no threat that isn’t an existential threat; no crisis that isn’t existential; and no anxiety that isn’t existential dread. As a buzzword it has become an intensifier, serving as a stylistic flair, while adding no substantive meaning.

Perhaps it’s being used as a synonym for ‘very bad’. However, most threats, crises and dreads are already understood to be very bad, in which case it’s redundant.

The Pitt is a very good hospital drama. Surprisingly few people die, only a minority are there by dint of their own actions and choices, and it is a remorseless and chilling example of how vulnerable the fleshy body that contains our essence really is.

As TV shows go, it’s very good. But it ain’t ‘existential’. So could we please stop trying to impress by using the word.

A.I. Fabler

March 28, 2026

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It’s not that I’ve turned my back on television completely — without it I’d have no way of knowing how society is changing in my absence. If anyone has their finger on the pulse of society it must be those well-grounded people in Hollywood, right?

Even the ad breaks are instructional. I didn’t know for instance that white people had left New Zealand and ad agencies were now staffed by under-20s pitching their products solely to Maoris. Good for them, I say. It’s heart warming to see that Maoris are now driving top-end Audis and taking out reverse mortgages so cheerfully, but it would also be good to know who’s inside those dancing animal costumes with their silly voices and uncoordinated limbs (perhaps that’s where the white people have gone).

So, to keep up with how society is progressing, and as a break from Yellowstone, I tuned into a show called Industry this week. The industry in question is, I think, the finance industry. It is not an industry where people make things. It’s not even an industry where people borrow and lend money. It’s an industry where people use every human exchange in order to screw each other over.

Based in a fictional city called London, with frequent excursions by private jet to fictional regions like North America and Europe, it has given me a crash lesson in how much cocaine can be shoved up people’s noses in the course of a day and how short, or non-existent, has foreplay become before intercourse takes place. It’s quite instructional, too, to learn that the intercourse itself is very short and can take place anywhere with the same or another gender category, but not, it would seem, for pleasure.

The lead character is, of course, a young black woman of tiny stature with a frighteningly impassive face to match her emotions. Her task is to make all white males look stupid and weak, and black males to be either heroically gay, or pliant and compassionate heterosexuals with large appendices.

This young lady, named Harper (presumably her parents were expecting a boy), has an existential gift rarely given to anyone else. She can spend hours looking at a computer screen watching stock prices go up and down and reliably predict where they will go by the end of the episode. We, the viewers, know she will be right, but a foot platoon of doubting colleagues never get the message. For which they must be destroyed.

Even for someone as out of touch as me it has become relatively easy to spot who is going to become her next victim. The weak English gentry die a slow death, collapsing into tears and botched attempts at suicide. Politicians put up a brave fight to out-manoeuvre her but inevitably slink away with only their corrupt souls intact. Jewish billionaires never stand a chance. Nor do supposed friends and sex buddies. But she’s black, small in stature, as good or better than all those who have historically oppressed her people and therefore we root for her. (My apologies to readers in Australia who may think that use of the term ‘root’ implies something improper.)

Harper and her ilk are probably meant to personify the ruthless, sociopathic nature of capitalism. It is a relief to climb into bed early each night, after doing my teeth twice (to get the nasty taste out of my mouth), and read a soporific book in keeping with my desperate desire to get a good night’s sleep. This week I picked up an old copy of Quotations from the Anarchists which I had purchased when I was around 18 years old and searching for a dogma to latch onto. I was able to accurately date the time of purchase because the price was shown in shillings and pence, and someone had written in the frontispiece, “If you steal this book, you will be shot”. As I am still alive that proves the book was mine.

If you are not familiar with the Anarchists I would suggest you try and read some of their statements. Don’t be put off by the fact that they made them 150 years ago or more. They are very modern and help explain some of the views espoused by Antifa supporters, and student unions at centres of learning like Harvard, Stanford or Oxford University: our emerging intellectual elite, in other words.

The wit and wisdom of the Anarchists were what I’d wanted to impart casually to others while leaning on the bar as an underage drinker in my youth, which is why I purchased the book of quotations in the first place. Easy to remember and as fresh today as when they were written, I thought I would share some of them.

“In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though rising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them. This is the sense in which we are really anarchists.” — Michel Bakunin, 1871

“Destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat.” — Errico Malatesta, 1926

“There must be no monarchy, no aristocracy, no democracy even, insofar as this implies a government acting in the name of the people and claiming to be the people. No authority, no government, even if it be popular government: this is the revolution.” — P.J. Proudhon, 1851

“A reform is always a compromise with the past, but the progress accomplished by revolution is always a promise of future progress.” — Peter Kropotkin, 1909

“Why does everyone think that he can be decent enough without the policeman, but that the club is needed for ‘the others’?” — Alexander Berkman, 1928

“In politics, as in finance, duplicity is regarded as a virtue.” — Michael Bakunin, 1873

Pretty fresh and lively, don’t you think? Try dropping them into a conversation with your adult children (if you can have such a thing as a conversation with your children). Or pop them into an exchange with friends, in place of discussing the best ways of turning cabbage into fermented sauerkraut. You’ll be very à la mode.

What has any of this got to do with Harper from Industry? Well, she, too, demonstrates the worth of destroying the bourgeoisie, politicians and capitalists — which is why we root for her — but she also highlights the yearning abyss that lies before us once we have eliminated all enemies of society. That abyss is filled by someone like Harper.

Wishing you a good night’s sleep.

A.I. Fabler

March 21, 2026

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One constant, however, is the advice that everyone needs a good night’s sleep. This is now a universal declaration. In fact, if it had been made the first Article of the Charter of the United Nations, we wouldn’t be so keen to see that absurd parody of human aspirations unwound. A good night’s sleep trumps the wishful thinking of “...eliminating the scourge of war” and would have gone a long way towards promoting “...peace and security”.

One good habit for achieving a great night’s sleep, claim the wellness gurus, is to abstain from the internet and television. Of course, if this habit was promoted too strongly there would be no clicks, therefore reducing media revenue, so it’s necessary to come at it from a different angle. This is where someone came up with the concept of blue light. Blue light emanating from the screen disables the natural course of the circadian rhythm and production of melatonin, they say. So turn those damn devices off at least an hour before going to bed (and don’t watch anything too exciting).

I tried this recently, but with no success. You see, for the last year or so I’ve been attempting to finish the TV series Yellowstone. It’s an old series now but I’ve invested time in it and, like throwing good money after bad, I’m prone to doing the same with precious time. I got sucked in by the Montana landscape and the horses, and by the Homeric struggles of the Dutton family to hold on to their ranch against invasions by American Indians wanting their land back, and by big city capitalists from ‘out East’ wanting to build casinos and condos.

Each episode follows a repeating storyline. A good guy comes in to the ranch house and tells John Dutton that there’s trouble up on the north ridge-line. Dutton thinks for half a second before telling him to go get the boys from the bunk house and saddle up. Pretty soon the boys are gathered in the corral doing tricks on their horses and putting rifles in their sheaths before heading off at full speed through the prairie grass against a magnificent Montana backdrop of pine trees and soaring mountains. We marvel at how cowboy hats never fall off no matter how fast the horses gallop. Then they arrive and unsheathe their rifles just before the ad break. After the ad break there is a lot of shooting, and a lot of bad guys die before the good guys ride home again.

Back home, John Dutton picks up a crystal decanter of Tennessee whisky and pours neat slugs for himself and his daughter Beth. At that point my cardiologist enters my room and says firmly, “No, you may not help yourself to a slug of whusky”. That’s pretty much it for every episode.

There are subplots, however, and the one involving his daughter Beth is a recurring one. Beth is a bad girl. Very bad. She got bad because as a teenager two excusatory things happened to her: her mother died, and she went down to the bunk house for a bit of mental/emotional distraction and got pregnant. Beth is also very smart, and she knew that a pregnant 15-year-old would likely not remain Daddy’s favourite little girl. So she got her older brother to take her for an abortion. Unfortunately she was in a hurry — Beth is a very “I want it now” type of girl — and the only place open was a clinic on the Indian reservation. Apparently (or so the screenwriters would have us believe), when pregnant 15-year-olds turn up at a reservation clinic the uterus is removed along with the unwanted foetus. So Beth can’t have children and is determined episode after episode to treat her brother like a living butterfly whose wings she can pull off.

One of the reasons I’ve taken so long to finish watching this series is that the structure of each episode has become so repetitive that I’m inclined to fall asleep before the shooting happens and before Beth has come up with another sexy but sadistic way of expressing her resentment.

On top of that, I am now trying to follow the advice of not exposing myself to blue light an hour before bedtime. So, last night I picked up a book from my mountainous pile of partly read treatises and took Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to bed. You may know him by his adopted nom de guerre of Vladimir Lenin.

If you were one of those persons whose Daddy paid $80,000 a year for you to attend college you probably won’t be reading this column. But if you were, and are, then you will likely think that Lenin was an inspirational Marxist revolutionary deserving of entry into your pantheon of history’s heroic figures. Truth is, he makes Beth Dutton look like a milksop paragon of compassion.

In the early 1990s, following the collapse of the USSR, a treasure trove of Soviet archives was opened to reveal both the public and private correspondence he exchanged during his glorious lifetime. Here he is in his own words:

In 1911 to Yuli Martov, leader of the Mensheviks: “The only hope of making the revolution work is if it’s controlled by a centralised party, with terror as one of the principal weapons.”

In 1918 he wrote: “It’s because there’s been comparatively so little bloodshed that we still haven’t got a proper dictatorship. Our regime is incredibly mild. It’s more like milk pudding than iron. That’s why it’s imperative we get the workers to dish out terror, too. They’ve got to bloody themselves, along with the rest of us. Dictatorship means unrestrained power based on unremitting force. In Gorky’s words, ‘It’s the logic of the axe’. Dzerzhinsky and his Chekists must make their arrests at night. Don’t look for evidence that the accused has acted against the state. The only question Iron Felix needs ask is, to what class does the accused belong? If there’s any doubt, just shoot him. And hang those blood-sucking kulaks (the farmers) in their thousands in full view of the people, so that everyone will see and tremble. When we capture White generals, organise public show trials, then shoot them. From now on, hostage taking should become state policy. We only need to carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million inhabitants. As for the rest, they must be liquidated without fear or favour.”

He sounds like a fully amped Democratic Socialist, don’t you think? Or a member of Antifa.

There are thousands of page-turning snippets like this. By the time I reached 4:00 a.m. I was just getting into his exchanges with Stalin, and I hadn’t got a wink of sleep. I can’t wait till I get to the bit where he has a threesome with his wife and the beautiful half-French, half-Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand. A week of daytime catnapping lies ahead if I’m to get any sleep.

A.I. Fabler

March 12, 2026

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The morse code came via undersea cables (hence “cable news”) so was necessarily short and to the point owing to cost and cable capacity. This might suggest that news, therefore, was unbiased, being restricted solely to the facts of the matter; but it was not free of attitude, because the news agency reflected the culture of the country in which it was based.

Americans often refer to the golden age of radio news by highlighting Edward R Murrow’s famous World War 2 reporting from London. To determine whether or not it was biased we need to remember that it represented only the view from London, not also the view from Berlin or Moscow, and every wartime public utterance was shaped by Allied propaganda and censorship.

By today’s standard, Murrow was a paragon of journalistic balance and integrity, but he proved to be a bellwether for the slide into corporate news control when, back in the US with his groundbreaking TV news program “See it Now” on CBS, he eventually clashed in 1958 with management who wanted to direct and control content.

Media critics today disdainfully denounce the so-called ‘Legacy Media’ as if it were a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact it was a feature of news and opinion publishing for the entire 20^th Century. In the USA, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce — and in the UK, Lords Northcliffe, Rothermere and Beaverbrook — overtly promoted their political causes, which were predominantly isolationism, fascism and imperialism. They boasted of their power to shape public opinion and sway elections. Lord Beaverbrook claimed he ran his papers “purely for the purpose of making propaganda.” Rupert Murdoch inherited their legacy.

What changed in the last 30 years was that the bias and political opinion-shaping moved sharply to the left within the Legacy Media: The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the BBC, CNN et al now predominantly promote globalism, anti-conservatism and identitarianism, and slant their facts and opinions accordingly.

To access real facts and a range of opinions we now turn to digital media. Substack is a platform for both, but it is also a platform (like all digital media) for non-facts, outright lies and extremely prejudiced opinions. Using an open mind and critical thinking, a reader may get a full clear picture of what is happening in the world. Unfortunately most readers look for a place where they can take their ignorance and prejudices and feel at home, having their views echoed and endorsed by slanted facts and biased opinions.

So, are we any better off, I wonder?

Some commentators view it as a golden age, rejoicing in the comparative decline of the legacy media. I think what they are actually celebrating is their new-found ability to express themselves free from the shackles of a proprietor. The irony is, however, that to gain an audience they need to appeal to the predilections (call it prejudices) of their readers. That’s what politicians do when searching for votes. That’s the trap of social media.

On the positive side we can probably acknowledge that the discerning reader — willing to spend time and apply skeptical judgment — can arrive at the actual facts of a matter. We know what is happening, but we’re no closer to knowing why things are happening, except at the most superficial level. We use labels. Students and unemployed graduates who violently rail against their country are variously described as nihilist, terrorist, anarchist, anarcho-terrorist, Antifa, anti-Semitic, spoiled middle-class Islamo-apologists engaging in luxury beliefs. Adults who created them are variously described as colonialist, racist, capitalist, gender-denying fascists.

It seems that the label is as far as we can get when searching for the why. Medicine and psychology do the same thing. (“Doctor, doctor, I have no appetite for food, I’m too tired to work and I feel like I don’t know who I am.” “Don’t worry. It sounds like you have Anorexia Nervosa and Body Dysmorphic Disorder, or BDD for short.”)

There are literally millions of books attempting to analyze the why of social behavior, with thousands more being published every week, but we seem no closer to being confident as to the why when describing extreme behaviors. Is it because it is too complex? Or could it be because it is too simple to accept?

When I trace my own path from Marxism to Socialism and Anarchism to Libertarianism, finally arriving at Anti-Establishment Skepticism, I recognize points along the way that could well have coincided with any one of the political stances I now hold in such disdain. These days you can throw an accusation at me of racism, sexism, elitism, Islamophobia or any other hate label you wish, and it will melt like snow on my back. They’re just labels.

Depending on your point of view, people’s politics either evolve or devolve in line with their changing emotional and mental development, and the influence of their surrounding social environments. Why do the young do and think the way they do? Why are young women disproportionately engaged? Perhaps the question is best put to an evolutionary biologist. The answer, the evolutionary biologist will say, is too simple for us to accept. It’s in our DNA.

In which case, relax. All things pass with time.

A.I. Fabler

March 5, 2026

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