Tyranny in the Territory. Here in New South Wales, the Covid pantomime has been bad enough – irrational, ever-changing constraints on our liberty, a one-eyed application of the Precautionary Principle and a vaccination policy which creeps, ratchet-like, from warm exhortation towards cold compulsion. We’ve tended to view the excesses of other jurisdictions as amusingly barmy, […]

We’re all gonna die – again! With public anxiety over ‘the Delta variant’ seriously on the wane, the Church of Covid has been in need of some fresh brimstone with which to terrify its adherents for some time, and waddya know, here it is – Omicron. We’ve been living, year in, year out, with new […]

When I came to Australia in 1976, fed up with a Britain that appeared committed to its own decline, there were few things I missed about the old country. A good tomato was impossible to find – we had to make do with a vast, tasteless variety concocted by the CSIRO for its fecundity and […]

Give our aboriginal kids an unfair advantage – teach them good, plain English. Letter to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Country Liberal Party (NT), 2.229 McMillans Road, Jingili NT 0810 Dear Jacinta, I’m writing to you in the hope that you can put me out of my misery. For years, now, I’ve had a recurrent dream about […]

An excellent summary of the Covid stats by Luke Massey in the Spectator. I have just one thing to add – the true measure of the lethality of a virus is surely its Infection Mortality Rate (IFR). Massey correctly observes that the the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for Covid is strikingly low, and should concern […]

The Glasgow pantomime has nearly had its run, and the cast of fools will soon disperse, borne homeward in a fleet of jets. Like all really bad ideas, climate catastrophism depends for its persistence upon the substitution of rational scepticism with a pharisaical appetite for personal rectitude. In a post-religious age, the pursuit of personal […]

You should always look after your emails, particularly those on contentious matters, upon which, far from the jury still being out, the witnesses are still being examined. One email in particular I now wish I could lay my hands on. I sent it way back in early 2020 to a friend who is a very […]

How a few physics lessons, over 50 years ago, made a lifelong climate sceptic of me. I left school in 1969, and in the two weeks between the end of our final exams and the end of term, my physics master took the opportunity to introduce us to two subjects he thought would be significant […]

In my last post, I attempted, once again, to fathom the extraordinary irrationality of so many people’s response to Covid. I drew attention to the wide and exciting range of natural, and globally-significant hazards whose effects rivalled, in probability and severity, that of a Covid-like viral epidemic, and which therefore, if the precautionary logic of […]

We can’t afford to spend trillions of dollars on everything that (ought to) scare us. One thing that has perturbed Harrumpf greatly about the present mass neurosis, otherwise known as the Covid crisis, is the extent to which our ability to evaluate hazard has been corrupted by the orgy of performative anxiety in which so […]