But those jetting off to a European or Asian summer holiday this year were in for a rude shock. Extreme heat, fuelled by climate change, is sucking the joy out of summer for everyone, everywhere.
Summer used to be a time for Australians getting out into nature, heading to the beach, going camping, hiking or fishing, but extreme temperatures and weather are increasingly making these leisure activities deeply unpleasant, if not dangerous. And while extreme heat obviously affects the quality of life for locals, it’s also having an impact on the tourism industry both here and overseas.
New research from Charles Darwin University shows extreme heat is altering when, where and how we travel. It found one-fifth of Australians surveyed had changed their most recent holiday because of weather, including 8 per cent who had been affected by fires, floods or storms, 6 per cent who had been affected by heavy rain, and 6 per cent due to impending hot weather.
“On top of this, a third of those surveyed had decided against going to holiday destinations they considered too hot, such as Dubai or northern Australia. We understand this represents the first empirical evidence that Australians are altering their travel patterns due to heat,” said the researchers.
The Productivity Commission is a government-funded economic think tank that’s meant to give independent advice about how to make the Australian economy work better. On this episode of What’s the Point?, Richard Denniss discusses whether it is fit for purpose.
Host: Richard Denniss, co-Chief Executive Officer, the Australia Institute //@richarddenniss
Host: Anna Chang, Managing Editor, The Point // @annachang
The United States recently launched a new offensive against Iran, “Operation Economic Outcast,” asking countries around the world to participate in a massive economic blockade. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is threatening to punish any country that is unwilling to comply with secondary economic sanctions. Many people view this latest US strategy as a Hail Mary Pass.
To discuss the possible outcome of the US’s economic war, and the impetus for it, John Mearsheimer, a former Air Force captain, professor of political science and author, returns to The Chris Hedges Report.
Hello subscribers! Thank you for all your thoughtful questions. I had to shut submissions down after eight hours because there were so many. If you’d like to support my work — and ask a question next time! — you can do it by becoming a paying subscriber here:
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Last summer, European news outlets reported that “volunteers” from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels had infiltrated Ukraine’s military—considered the world’s “drone superpower”—to learn cutting-edge drone warfare so they could use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home.
Claims that this problem is ongoing have not yet been publicly verified by the U.S. intelligence community or the media. As yet, however, they remain undisputed. They now demand further scrutiny and broader attention in the United States to prompt appropriate action. If it’s not too late, and if the reports are correct, the U.S. urgently needs to terminate this knowledge transfer from Ukrainian soldiers to Latin America’s crime lords.
Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account, Friday August 28, at 7:00 - 8:00pm ET. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the live on YouTube/X.
Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
It is no surprise even to the most casual observer of American culture that pornography is rotting the soul of America. More than 10% of American men self-report being addicted to pornography, while over 70% say they used pornography in the last year—and the actual figures are likely much higher. Declining marriage rates, increased incidents of suicide, and decreased productivity can all be traced to the rise of this nearly $100 billion industry. And, even worse, the kind of pornography that saturates the internet is not the type of casual nudity the average American imagines. It is hardcore pornography that would immediately disgust all but the addicted.
That’s far from the founders’ vision for America.
Any honest scholar of the American Founding will assure you that no founding father would ever have imagined that a republican form of government could coexist with such rampant moral degeneracy. For most of American history, obscene material was not only illegal but subject to criminal prosecution.
For a long time our most heated public and academic debates have been almost uniformly characterized by false dichotomies. We are supposed to choose between “realism” and “idealism” in foreign affairs and ethical theory; John Rawls’s excessively egalitarian “theory of justice” and Robert Nozick’s untenable “minimal state”; post-liberal dogmatism and a decayed liberalism that is increasingly oblivious to the moral foundations of democracy.
I often ask myself: What of a tough-minded, morally serious politics that unites principle and prudence, and advocates a broadly secular state but is not neutral between religion and irreligion? What about a project that defends liberty and equality without succumbing to the illusion of human autonomy, or an indiscriminate egalitarianism that levels and homogenizes? How about “liberty under God and the laws,” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s memorable formulation, that is in equal measure liberal and conservative? Why can’t we think more deeply and dialectically and move beyond dichotomies that distort much more than they illuminate?
UPDATE 4 PM: Whoa, you beat your own record! I am pausing comments after eight hours because I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer all the ones I have. I’ll try my best! But I’ve been answering them old-school in a Word Doc all day (no goddamned AI for me) and I’m already pushing 2000 words. I’ve also answered some of you here in the comments, so check your name. Thank you! Article with answers will be out ASAP.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Angus discuss the carve-out for Queensland and Northern Territory data centres that’ll allow them to run off coal and gas, the skyrocketing profits of some of Australia’s biggest companies, and the east coast vs west coast beef over GST revenue.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 27 August 2026.
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief, is certain about at least one thing regarding Israeli propaganda tactics: “If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes.” The task of professional journalists and media outlets is to review evidence and verify the information they are reporting, but when it comes to Israel, Western establishment media function as stenographers, echoing their lies globally.
Media Release Number 2026-23: At its meeting today, the Payments System Board discussed a range of issues, including:The annual Assessment of the ASX clearing and settlement facilities against the Financial Stability Standards; The future of account-to-account (A2A) payments; Consultation on the Role of RITS in Supporting Settlement in a Tokenised Ecosystem; Cash distribution regulatory framework.
In the opening of Federalist 1, Publius makes clear to his countrymen the great question that Providence had placed before them. Americans, he said, have the opportunity to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
This was the momentous question that underlay the American Founding. Now, 250 years after the American Revolution, we face the same one today.
A self-governing people must cultivate the habits that make responsible public action possible. They must learn to connect principles with practice, to deliberate about the proper ends of political action, and to judge wisely among the means available to achieve those ends. This is the work of civic education: forming citizens capable of exercising prudence to pass on the blessings of liberty we received to future generations.
The study of history is an essential preparation for that work. By learning the stories of those who have gone before us, we acquire knowledge and experience that help us deliberate well about the questions before us. This formation in knowledge for the sake of prudence is the purpose of history and civics education—and we are in dire need of it today.
In Breaking Free of Neoliberalism in Trump Times (Lorimer, 2026), Alex Himelfarb explores neoliberalism’s history and troubling reappearance in Canadian politics, and why the need for new thinking is more urgent than ever.
As the world reels from the turmoil of American politics, former senior bureaucrat and Broadbent Research Fellow Alex Himelfarb addresses the challenges facing Canadians after decades of neoliberal thinking have undermined the capacity of governments to protect and support their citizens.
Himelfarb offers an insider’s account of how the neoliberal ideas of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were first brought to Canada by Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, and Paul Martin and flourished under the Harper decade. In 2025, Canadians opted for the unifying message of Mark Carney and Elbows Up, and Carney’s speech at Davos in early 2026 recognized that we need a whole new approach to the world’s politics and economics. Yet in a series of rapid decisions, his government has quietly reinforced the neoliberal agenda of unregulated industries, growing inequality, and limited action on climate change. Gaining a majority in mid-2026, the Carney government was free to pursue economic growth to achieve greater independence from US-Canada ties. Yet this single-minded agenda misses much of what Canadians expect and need from their federal government.
The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
The Great American Trade War Continues | The American Mind Podcast
On this episode of Follow the Money, Maiy Azize and Matt Grudnoff join Ebony Bennett to discuss how the government’s changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing are allowing more first-homebuyers to enter the market, the data revealing that migration isn’t the cause of the housing crisis, and the dire situation facing Australian renters.
Australia’s cultural diversity is our greatest strength and has enriched our communities and contribute to our economy.
As Australia considers important national conversations about racism and discrimination, how can we build a stronger sense of belonging for everyone? Australia is currently holding both an Inquiry into Racism, Hate and Violence Directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. What does the evidence tell us about the experiences of different communities, and what practical steps can help foster trust, inclusion, and mutual respect?
Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman joined us for our August 2026 John Cain Lunch for a discussion on respect, dignity and equality in Australia, the barriers that can undermine it, and the opportunities for governments, community organisations, and individuals to foster inclusion, trust and shared purpose.
Watch the recording below.
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Giridharan Sivaraman began his role as Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner (RDC) in March 2024.
Dozens of “gap” statistics have become so deeply embedded in our political discourse that we hardly question whether unequal outcomes are actually evidence of discrimination. “Women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men.” “Hispanic students make up a disproportionately small percentage of university graduates.” “Black women must work into the following July to catch up to what white men made the previous year.”
In our equity-obsessed age, each one of these “gap stats” has a grimy underbelly, made up of individuals who are unfairly denied the fruits of their talents because institutions have tried to force equal outcomes: men who work longer hours on average; Asians who have higher SAT scores on average; Millennial and Gen Z white applicants who get passed over at work because they don’t add to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Our conversation ranged from the fires and wildfire smoke plaguing us all; what it means to have compassion for those in denial about our changed world; grief; and the luxury of despair in the imperial core. Below is a transcript of our wide-ranging conversation.
In one month, my new book will be in folks' hands. "Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census" tells the story of what it takes to produce democracy's data - and how hard it was to do this in 2020 during a pandemic and while struggling with what I call "Jenga politics" (when various forces keep taking out planks and putting more pressure on top). It's an ethnography, a love letter to civil servants, and a warning to us all about how brittle our democratic project is. It's also a reminder that we can fight for our democracy. It's also a reflection on how the legitimacy of high-stakes data stems from the social fabric that surrounds it, not any inherent property of the data. (Hint: data politics are not just a concern for the census... they also concern our AI future.)
This book is over 10 years in the making. I really really reallyhope I can convince you to buy a copy. Or to ask your library to order a copy so you can check it out! (Pretty please with a cherry on top!)
The national debt of the United States just crossed $40 trillion.
That number is so large that it risks becoming meaningless. But consider this: the federal government did not reach $30 trillion in debt until January 2022. It added the next $10 trillion in just four and a half years. As of August 18, the Treasury reported gross federal debt of approximately $40.05 trillion—$32.27 trillion held by the public and another $7.78 trillion owed within the government itself.
The conventional debate over our fiscal catastrophe is familiar. Democrats blame Republican tax cuts. Republicans blame Democratic spending. Budget experts correctly point to Social Security, Medicare, defense spending, pandemic relief, and now the staggering cost of servicing the debt itself.
But there is another cause of our fiscal predicament that almost no one in Washington is willing to discuss: the federal government spends enormous sums of money on things the Constitution never authorized it to fund.
The chart below tells a remarkable story. At the founding, the federal debt was below 40% of the nation’s economic output, largely the legacy of the Revolutionary War. Successive administrations paid it down. After the War of 1812, it rose again and then fell. By 1835, President Andrew Jackson’s administration had essentially extinguished the national debt.
On this episode of After America, Chas Licciardello joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the latest from the midterm primaries, the “civil war” between democratic socialist and establishment Democrats, and why Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff has MAGA rattled.
It also questions the RBA’s apparent obsession with keeping wages low.
The research by Chief Economist Greg Jericho has found that using the Reserve Bank’s own predictions, it will take workers until 2037 to get back to where they were at the end of the COVID pandemic.
The analysis highlights the RBA’s repeated warnings about the dangers of wage growth, even though wages are stagnant, yet prices and corporate profits are soaring.
It also reiterates that it’s profits to blame for surging inflation, not consumer spending, even though consumers have been punished for inflation with repeated interest rate rises.
The analysis reveals that governments are also to blame for stalling wages, with many imposing unfair and unnecessary caps on public service wages, blatantly offering pay rises below inflation.
“People understand that, in very broad terms, the Reserve Bank has put up interest rates in response to high inflation,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.
“But what many don’t realise is that the RBA seems to be obsessed with keeping wages down.
“In a recent meeting, Michele Bullock warned of ‘higher wage increases that will feed through into business’.
“What makes that comment even more extraordinary, is that it came immediately after the worst quarter of wage growth in four and a half years.
Australian renters are giving up weeks of their working year to cover rising rents, with lower paid workers losing the equivalent of their entire annual leave entitlement.
Everybody’s Home’s 2026 Priced Out report analysed rental affordability for Australians earning between $40,000 and $130,000 per year across capital cities and regional areas.
Consider a simple question. The Biden Administration imported somewhere between six and ten million immigrants into the United States illegally. Do you think President AOC or President Newsom, if given the chance starting in January 2029, would let in fewer than Biden or more?
The American people don’t need a detailed policy briefing to answer that question. Amnesty and mass immigration are key features of expanding the Democratic Party coalition. Its ideology and electoral math, along with a vast government-contractor apparatus that supports the party, entrench a quasi-legal parallel rights regime.
Meanwhile, in the wake of Minneapolis, conventional GOP analysis holds that a combination of unsurvivable headlines and business interests demanding labor flexibility will pull the Republican Party back toward accommodation. That calculation may hold for another few months in Washington, or even survive until the midterms. It will not survive beyond then.
The accommodationist wing of the Republican Party sees immigration as the kind of disagreement that can be settled with a clever compromise, new labels, or a schedule of fines and penalties offered to voters who were promised the opposite in 2024, and who will bear the consequences of continued wage stagnation.
On October 23, 1956, students gathered at the foot of Sandor Petofi’s statue in Budapest and read his poem “Rise, Magyar!” made famous in the democratic revolution of 1848. Workers, and even soldiers, soon joined the students. The demonstrators took over the state-run radio station and the Communist Party offices and toppled a huge statue of Stalin, dragging it through the streets. Rebellion spread throughout the country. The demonstrators—now Freedom Fighters—held Soviet occupation forces at bay for several days.
On November 1, the Hungarian Prime Minister announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. At dawn, November 4, the Soviets launched a major invasion of Hungary, in an offensive involving tens of thousands of additional troops, air and artillery assaults, and 6,000 tanks. A heroic resistance was crushed in less than a week.
The last free Hungarian radio broadcast spent its final hours repeating the Gettysburg Address in seven languages, followed by an S.O.S. Over 20,000 Hungarians were tried and sentenced for participation in the uprising, hundreds receiving the death sentence. An estimated 200,000 Hungarians—of a population of nine million—became refugees. Forty-seven thousand came to the United States. Hungary became a member of NATO on March 12, 1999.
Widespread use of the word “meritocracy” may only be possible in the world it describes. British sociologist and former Labour Party official Michael Young coined the term in a 1958 satire as a sly alternative to aristocracy, clumsily mixing Latin (mereo: to deserve) with Greek (kratos: power, rule). Young’s friend, a classicist, warned he would be “laughed to scorn” for employing such a barbarism. Her caution was, sadly, optimistic.
Nonetheless, meritocracy’s advocates have attempted to supply it with a noble lineage. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio and former presidential candidate, is convinced the 20th-century term is central to the American experiment going back to 1776. Palantir’s Jordan Chandler Hirsch likewise argues that America was “born meritorious,” defining meritocracy as when government and society operate through objective measures of “quality and talent, open competition based on fair play, and ruthless disinterest in any other factor.”
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss another quarter of no “wage-price spiral”, plus the passage of massive NDIS cuts and gambling legislation through parliament.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 20 August 2026.
If this episode raised issues for you, you can call the National Gambling Helpline on 1800 858 858 for free, professional and confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Or visit Gambling Help Online at www.gamblinghelponline.org.au.
If you or anyone you know needs help, you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or online at www.lifeline.org.au.
The bipartisan US-backed genocide in Gaza exposed the corruption of the political system in the United States and the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party, which claims to represent working people. Rather than recognizing this fact and shifting its stances to better represent its voting base, the Democratic Party establishment is attacking candidates who run on progressive platforms and is setting the stage for another Republican victory.
Everybody’s Home is calling on politicians to stop amplifying misleading claims that changes to investor tax breaks will push up rents, warning that the scare campaign risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The national housing campaign said changes to negative gearing arrangements, which will not change for existing landlords, should not be used to justify higher rents. Repeated claims that rents will inevitably rise are creating a permission structure for landlords to charge renters more.
The campaign was responding to cherry-picked figures and quotes from the National Australia Bank and Ray White property, which were both walked back.
Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize said: “Politicians should not be misleading landlords and renters about these reforms.
“Existing landlords shouldn’t use investor tax break reform as an excuse to put up the rent. But every time politicians repeat the claim that rents will rise, or it gets reported as an inevitable consequence of reform, it creates an expectation that renters can be charged more.
“Rents were rising long before these reforms. They rose while negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount were fully in place. Renters have been told rents must rise when interest rates go up, and when they go down. Now they are being told rents must rise because tax breaks are being wound back.
Thirty-two Cubans died when American forces entered Caracas on January 3, 2026, to capture Nicolás Maduro. Cuba and Venezuela are more than a thousand miles apart. Why were Cubans dying in defense of Maduro? How did a small Caribbean island become so deeply invested in the survival of another country’s dictatorship?
To answer those questions, we have to go back nearly seven decades to a revolution that promised liberation but spent a lifetime exporting authoritarianism and reshaping the politics of an entire hemisphere.
From the moment he seized power in 1959, Fidel Castro knew that the survival of his revolution depended on its spreading throughout South America. In the years that followed, Havana trained Marxist guerrillas across Latin America, dispatched troops to fight Soviet proxy wars in Africa, supported Syria in its war against Israel, and embedded intelligence officers inside allied dictatorships. Today, it’s widely reported that Cuban nationals are fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.
Because we use it every day, most people assume that they know how money works. The truth is that money is a strange invention: the way it works today is neither natural nor inevitable, but the product of particular choices that could have been made differently. Like other complex technical systems, the design of our monetary system has profound consequences for our politics and collective well-being.
In Against Money(2026, Chicago University Press), economists Josh W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev unpack misleading depictions of money, often found in the business press and introductory economics courses, which collapse the complex and deeply political story of money, credit, and debt into a simple narrative that obscures the laws and institutions that make up modern monetary systems. They argue that money is not a neutral ledger of real exchange values, but a powerful and malleable technology for coordinating the activities of market actors, making possible the complex economic coordination on which modern economies depend.
The American Mind Podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Groypers, Grifters, and the GOP: Florida’s Primary Election | The American Mind Podcast
Florida is conducting a primary election to pick Governor Ron DeSantis’s conservative successor. President Trump’s choice, Representative Byron Donalds, leads in the polls. Opposing him, political newcomer James Fishback leads a young, online centric and anti-Israel platform. Meanwhile, the Left coalition continues its reckoning with Woke, reordering to capture populist, pro-Gaza, and anticapitalist energy. Plus, backlash against Big Tech: data centers, Flock cameras, and more!
Media Release Number 2026-21: The Reserve Bank of Australia and People’s Bank of China have renewed the Bilateral Local Currency Swap Agreement for a further five years.
Dr Richard Denniss, Australia Institute co-CEO and author of More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia, joins Ebony Bennett to discuss why Australia gives away gas to multinational corporations and why similarly dud deals could happen with Big Tech and other industries if we don’t learn lessons from the past.
An old, not to say ancient, debate among certain scholars is whether and to what extent the American Founding was ancient versus modern. That is to ask: to what extent, if any, was ancient political philosophy not only an inspiration to the American founders but actually incorporated into the regime they built? This issue rises well above a mere scholarly controversy over “sources” and goes to the heart of what kind of regime the American founders were trying to build, to what America is.
To sum up as briefly as possible, one view holds that the American regime is purely modern—that is, derived wholly and self-consciously from modern political philosophy. For instance, the influential political scientist Joseph Cropsey declared America “an arena in which modernity is working itself out” and “the microcosm of modernity, repeating in its regime, on the level of popular consciousness, the major noetic events of the modern world.” Those who hold this view tend to conclude that this origin makes America, and a fortiori Americans, “low but solid,” concerned more with comfortable self-preservation than with the soul.
