“Keeping perspective” is Michael Pascoe’s mantra. He writes that AI mania has not just warped perspective, it risks blowing up reality.

Over more decades than I care to count of market watching and reporting, I haven’t seen a time when there’s been more wide-spread conviction that we’re experiencing a dangerous bubble that’s sure to pop, yet the money keeps pouring in to inflate it. 

The lead up to the “Crash of 87”, now viewed in the rearview mirror as a minor hiccup, was relatively muted. Not even the “dot bomb” bubble at the turn of the century, when all a company had to do to get a share price boost was to add “e” or “dotcom” to its name, was as widely perceived as over-cooked as the present outlook. 

What makes a life virtuous? The answer might seem simple: virtuous actions – actions that align with morality.

But life is more than doing. Frequently, we just think. We observe and spectate; meditate and contemplate. Life often unfolds in our heads.

As a philosopher, I specialize in the Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, who had volumes – literally – to say about virtuous actions. What I find fascinating, however, is that Kant also believed people can think virtuously, and should.

Building a stable ‘abode of thought’: Kant’s rules for virtuous thinking

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, a hundred years ago

CUM SEDECIM ANNOS ERIM, ante centum annos

I wondered about men having tits

De viris uberibus cogitabam

To feed the kids when women were hunting

Ad liberos pascendos cum feminae venantur

And women speaking in a manly voice

Et mulieribus voce virili loquentibus

Rather than this grinding pitchy

Potius quam hac stridula 

Which turns songs into screams

Quae carmina in clamores mutat

But god had seen that only a few men

Sed deus viderat paucos tantum viros

Would develop the effimination of their feelings

Effeminationem affectuum suorum evolvere

Wearing the femme attire 

Vestimenta feminina gerentes

Until the pharmas invented blockers

Donec pharmaceutica medicamenta invenerunt

And the diversification came in

Climate change is serious, but we’ve made great progress. We need to keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions.

But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.

It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.

A NEW WAY TO LOOK AT THE PROBLEM

Three tough truths about climate

What I want everyone at COP30 to know.

By Bill Gates published 19 hours ago

There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

“Your mom” has become the accidental protagonist of October 2025. Once a throwaway line in online debates, she now features in exchanges at the highest levels of American politics. The unlikely transformation began with S.V. Date, a journalist from the HuffPost, who repeatedly tried to ask the Trump administration difficult questions. Each time, he was met not with answers but with taunts – and, eventually, jokes about his mother.

The empire of irony: Why memes are America’s new propaganda
How Trump rules the US with memes and why ‘brain-numbing’ content is the future of politics

By Vitaly Ryumshin

The United Nations has recently come under attack from the Trump Administration and, much as it goes against the grain, it’s difficult to argue with real-estate-developer-cum-ambassador-Representative for U.N. Management and Reform [sic], Jeff Bartos:

Over 80 years, the UN has grown bloated, unfocused, too often ineffective, and sometimes even part of the problem. The UN’s failure to deliver on its core mandates is alarming and undeniable.

Yet the problem isn’t really the UN.

It’s the largest living structure on Earth, 3000 individual reefs, 900 islands, 1430 miles, and it may be collapsing.

Alas, The Great Barrier Reef Annual Summary Report of Coral Reef Conditions, 2024-2025 presents a dire picture, the poorest condition ever, the worst report in recorded history. Moreover, mass bleaching of coral has been confirmed in 83 countries. Something is seriously wrong with the oceans; this is too anomalous, too massive to ignore as a passing one-off event.

Robert Hunziker

The ultimate expression of “everyone is twelve now” theory is in the mainstream worldview promoted by western pundits and politicians which holds that the world is full of evil villains doing evil things simply because they are evil, and that these Bad Guys are opposed by the virtuous Good Guys of the US-led world order.

You Believe the Mainstream Narrative? of Course You Do, You're Twelve

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

When President Donald Trump announced that the C.I.A. had been authorized to conduct operations inside Venezuela, just as U.S drones struck another small boat off Venezuela’s coast, few people in the United States realized that much of this militarization begins on the soil of a land denied its own sovereignty: Puerto Rico.

The Oldest Colony, the Newest War: Puerto Rico as a Launchpad for War on Venezuela

French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to intervene militarily in Ukraine, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has claimed. In a statement published on Monday, the agency’s press department suggested that he desperately wants to leave his mark on history.  

 ”Having failed as a politician and despaired of ever pulling the country out of the long social and economic crisis, he does not give up the hope to go down in history as a military leader,” the SVR claimed, adding that Macron “dreams of a military intervention in Ukraine” and is “known for fantasizing about Napoleon’s ‘laurels’.” 

US President Donald Trump has promised sweeping support for Japan and its new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, amid the intensifying rivalry with China in the Indo-Pacific.

Trump hailed Japan as “an ally at the strongest level” during his visit to Tokyo on Tuesday, noting that the longtime US ally was set to purchase “a large amount of new military equipment” and expressing confidence that bilateral ties would become “stronger than ever before.”

“I want to just let you know – any time you have any question, any doubt, anything you want, any favors you need, anything I can do to help Japan, we will be there,” Trump said.

Putin calm re oil sanctions and in reply to first question re EU ban on Russian toilet bowls: “This will cost them dearly. They will need them, if they maintain same policies toward Russia.” FSB’s Bortnikov briefs Nat’l Security Council on counterterrorism...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticym1Y0bMw

https://raymcgovern.com/2025/10/26/oil-sanctions-and-toilet-bowls/

THE EUROPEAN GRAVY TRAIN-WRECK IS GOING DOWNHILL AT SPEEDS ONLY MATCHED BY ORESHNIKS... SORRY, I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING.....

It’s now in all the media. Lee Jae-myung will meet Donald Trump and Xi Jinping next week.

Both are billed as state visits; only one will function as one. The first will be a circus, the second will be a summit. The difference could not be starker.

Jeffrey Robertson

The meeting with Trump will be noisy, flashy, and theatrical – a circus where the clown wears a blue suit, sports a fake tan and has all the acumen of the bowl from a broken shithouse. The meeting with Xi will be quiet, deliberate, and steeped in planning – a summit where the statesman speaks softly, moves precisely and brings clear deliverables.

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he would only meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin once the terms of a potential deal were clear. Moscow agrees that such a meeting must be carefully prepared, but the two sides mean very different things.

Fyodor Lukyanov: The road to peace runs through the ruins of Atlanticism

Without addressing NATO’s legacy, no deal on Ukraine will hold

For Washington, the goal is an immediate end to hostilities wherever they are taking place. Only after a ceasefire would the US allow others, particularly the Western Europeans, to take the lead in resolving the situation. Moscow, however, insists on addressing the root causes of the conflict first. This, Russian officials argue, requires a comprehensive, multifaceted package deal agreed upon in advance and not a hasty truce.

Environment Minister Murray Watt wants the Parliament to amend our environmental laws, but leave a key component for him and his Department to sort out later. Former Senator Rex Patrick reports on EPBC reform.

“Trust me, I’m from the Government”.

It appears the Environment Minister, Senator Murray Watt, wants to push Federal Labor’s environmental reforms through the Parliament with a core element, the National Environmental standards, hidden from sight.

Watt happens. A Labor deal with Coalition or Greens on environment?
by Rex Patrick

The Senate should properly reject that approach.