University education in the 1950s was scarce but cheap. Today it is abundant but expensive. Its scarcity in the 1950s was generated by the fact that the percentage of intellectually gifted and motivated persons in any given population is limited. The abundance of university education today is not a function of lower real prices but of lower entry scores

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Al Gore is a bad enough climate hustler, but Cool Australia's insidious and habitually untrue scare stories being taught in the overwhelming majority of Australian schools are worse. If Johnny can't read it may well be because his attention has been captured by tall tales of climate refugees, wicked capitalists, the evils of eating meat and imminent planetary doom

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The frontrunner and current hot tip to fill America's Supreme Court vacancy is Amy Coney Barrett. She’s not yet 50, so a lifetime appointment could see her a SCOTUS fixture for perhaps 30 years, if Ginsburg's legal longevity is any guide. First, though, the replacement -- be it Barrett or someone else -- must run the Left's gauntlet of slanders and violence

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Walk unthinkingly in front of a car and, apart from an immediate and rather painful lesson in the physics of propelled objects, what you will learn is that emergency wards are staffed with lovely, caring people who drive you half crazy before finally agreeing to let you limp home

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It has been 140 years since Ned Kelly held innocent Victorians hostage at Glenrowan, costing two of them their lives. Things are a bit different these days: an entire state is the captive of a Premier whose every latest entry in a growing ledger of incompetence is matched by the further, step-by-step dismantling of his subjects' liberties

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In Australia those who know Bruce Pascoe’s book is damaging stupidity are too frightened to criticise the cultural establishment and the vile Twitter mob they cultivate, not to mention the question of careerism. While they remain mute and a charlatan capers from award to academic sinecure, a French academic and man of the Left isn't so reticent

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Apart from Victoria, whose staggering COVID death toll is testament to official incompetence that failed to protect the vulnerable elderly, Australia has done rather well in terms of fatalities. Yet border closures, panicked policies and consequent economic ruin remain the order of the day. Perhaps our leaders should listen to Irish biochemist Ivor Cummins

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The diversity-inclusion-equity faith system beloved of the Left insists that we must all share its addiction and that heretics must be brought ruthlessly into line. What those who advocate and advance identitarian politics refuse to recognise is that race talk traps people inside their skin tone, inside their melanin count, forever

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Many medical advances have emerged from evil origins, Nazi experimentation on humans coming readily to mind. As the global effort to produce a COVID-19 vaccine is seeing, in some cases, the use of aborted fetal tissue, surely the moral question must hinge on the issue of consent

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While art and literature tended to stagnate in the 18th century, the same can't be said of music. In the ninth installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation', Bach, Handel, Haydn, and especially Mozart write the soundtrack for the cultural shift to Romanticism and, ultimately, the implied rejection of civilisation itself

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The author and essayist Ivor Brown observed that those most likely to be gulled are recipients of 'higher education that has failed to be high enough'. Those words resonate: today's pullers-down of statues are educated enough to formulate simplistic generalisations, but not to appreciate the ironies of existence

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A recent Family Court decision will prove as influential as it is to be regretted. As a consequence of the bitter family dispute over a natal boy's oestrogen treatments only the bravest parents and medical practitioners will be game to  pursue alternative, psychotherapeutic options for their gender-confused offspring

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She gets the facts wrong, she grovels and simpers and serves up Dorothy Dixers from bended knee when chatting with the leftist likes of Jane Fonda, Hillary Clinton or disgraced ex-FBI director James Comey. But when the ABC compere interviews a Republican, neither truth nor civility has anything to do with it

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Doctors who have successfully treated COVID-19 are dismissed as cranks if they don’t follow the official 'science'. Worse, they have been denied access to the very drug, hydroxychloroquine, that could be saving lives, as a growing body of study-backed evidence continues to establish

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Eventually, when we can look back at the panicdemic of 2020, the political machines will have been hard at work to prop up the storyline that a health disaster on the scale of the Spanish flu was averted only by wise governments applying tough medicine. The media will be onboard, of course, and lies the stock in trade

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Talk of human rights invariably invokes the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, often cited as akin to sacred text. As Aaron Rhodes observes in his timely and important book, far from defending liberty, an international human rights regime has turned its back on the very principles of its foundation

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Like sorcerers who point the bone, the Left has worked its magic on Aborigines, leaving many unable even to identify friend from foe.  Institutionalised racism is repackaged as positive discrimination.  Apartheid is re-framed as Aboriginal separatism. And worst of all, the new lie holds that police are natural enemies of indigenous Australia

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The idea that 'systemic racism' sees Aborigines imprisoned, killed or both in disproportionate numbers isn’t supported by the facts. Indeed, the opposite is true.  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are given lesser sentences because they are indigenous. Racism really is at work, but it's in the form of 'positive discrimination'

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Islam teaches that racism, slavery and imperialism are noble as long as they are inflicted on infidels. Can anyone be surprised then, that in the Muslim world support for racism, slavery and imperialism is high? Reformers very soon realise there are no 'standards to which an appeal can be made' in the Islamic world

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In early July, when online bookies posted odds of 3-1 on President Trump being re-elected, I put $400 on The Donald taking the laurels on Nov 3. The odds have come way down since then, and the vision and principles showcased at the GOP convention make me think they will shrink even further

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Chess offers no excuses. You start with equal forces. All pieces are visible and every move is chosen. The death of your king is entirely your fault -- unless, that is, your opponent succumbs to a lust for greatness as old as Adam and Eve and enters the tournament with a computer concealed in his shoe

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As Jacques Mallet du Pan put it, “Like to Saturn, the revolution devours its children.” These days, it is more like the children devouring Saturn. True, the occasional Millennial has been caught out by cancel culture but it’s their Boomer parents who have really felt the scythe

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In the latest installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's landmark series, the focus shifts to religious conflicts that reframed perspectives in a divided Europe, from Catholicism's reverence for tradition and authority to a Protestant embrace of reason and experience as the basis of knowledge

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Being branded 'batshit crazy' for expressing concern that a once great state is led by a liar and policed by brass-encrusted apparatchiks is hardly likely to restore confidence in a police force beset by scandals, from stitching up a cardinal to turning Lawyer X against her clients. If Daniel Andrews is allowed to continue, his police will become the enemy of the people, not their defenders

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