the phantom

I paid a plumbing company $4,400 to replace a sewer line under my garage, and now my garage floor looks like it lost a fight with a sidewalk 😭 They cut a huge section out of the concrete, repaired the pipe, and patched it back in with concrete that doesn’t even remotely match the original floor. So I asked the foreman when they planned to stain or finish it so it would blend in better… And this man literally laughed and said: “It’s a garage floor, buddy, not the Taj Mahal. Be glad it’s not dirt.” 💀 BE GLAD IT’S NOT DIRT?? I’m sorry, but if I’m paying thousands of dollars for a “professional” repair, I feel like the end result shouldn’t look like a random parking lot patch job. Now I’m sitting here wondering if this just tanked the appearance — and possibly the resale value — of my garage. Would you push back and demand they resurface the area properly, or am I overreacting?

How many times have they visited Alice Springs?

I know it’s 2026 and women are supposed to do what ever they want but the gym outfits are out of control. Some of these women literally wearing a bra and 3 inch compression shorts. It’s over revealing and it’s not dignified. And it’s honestly not even that attractive compared to tasteful cleavage. It feels like an over share that nobody asked for and it also normalizes a culture of immodesty. Leave it behind.

The sexual revolution destroyed women's bargaining power and men have been the primary beneficiaries ever since. Before the 1960s, if a man wanted physical intimacy, the price was commitment. Marriage. A ring. A promise before God and family. The sexual revolution removed that requirement entirely. Women were told that casual sex was empowering. That waiting was old-fashioned. But men and women are not the same. Men can walk away from casual hookups. Women are left with emotional attachment and potential pregnancy in a dating market where commitment is no longer expected. The cruel irony is that the movement marketed as women's liberation primarily served men's interests. Men got access without commitment. Women got freedom without security. Look around at the results: record-low marriage rates, record-high antidepressant prescriptions among young women, and a generation of men who see no reason to grow up. Who was really liberated here?

Most of those ferociously complaining about the budget have never worked in public policy, never had to consider balancing the huge issues in a $800 billion a year budget, never implemented reforms that impact all 28 million Australians, never copped the public hate campaigns against them & their families. We are seeing the lid being lifted on the priorities of those people.

Casablanca (1942) endures not simply because it's romantic, stylish, and endlessly quotable, but because it presents men and women as different, valuable, and profoundly complementary... At its centre are Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund: two wounded, intelligent adults navigating love, duty, war, and moral choice. Rick begins cynical, guarded, and detached, but beneath the hard exterior lies courage, loyalty, and a deeply ethical core. Ilsa brings warmth, emotional insight, compassion, and a powerful sense of human connection. Neither diminishes the other. Their differences matter; strengthening what they are able to see, feel, and ultimately do. This isn't a story about dominance, sameness, or individual gratification. It's about sacrifice, responsibility, and it's about love that extends beyond personal desire. Rick’s decisive action and willingness to bear pain intersect with Ilsa’s honesty, tenderness, and emotional truth. Together, they help illuminate the path toward something greater than themselves. Humphrey Bogart gives Rick a restrained but unforgettable masculinity: capable, resilient, dryly humorous, and morally awakened. Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa is graceful, conflicted, and emotionally intelligent, conveying enormous depth with a glance or a pause. Set against the turmoil of World War II, Casablanca also reminds us that strong partnerships between men and women can serve not only personal happiness but higher ideals: courage, freedom, loyalty, and human flourishing. More than eighty years after it's release, Casablanca remains one of cinema’s great love stories because it recognises a timeless truth: masculinity and femininity need not compete. At their best, they can collaborate, challenge, and elevate one another. Few films portray that balance with such elegance, maturity, and emotional power.

An academic painted a picture of his friend Tatyana and then wrote this about it: "Through the act of painting, I subvert traditional artist–subject hierarchies and instead foster a collaborative, mutual dialogue that allows for shared agency in the portrayal of the subject. In reflecting on the painting’s creation, I navigate the tension between personal identity, social context and academic constraints at Oxford, a space often resistant to vulnerability. The painting Tatyana becomes a dynamic site of negotiation, where multiple identities, histories and truths coexist, reminding us that meaning and power are never fixed but always shifting. This work, while exploring the limits of representation, invites ongoing dialogue and engagement with the vulnerabilities it seeks to represent, positioning the painting as a site for continuous transformation and collective understanding."

It looks like we’re going to have more and more childless women in society. What consequences do you think this will have for humanity?

I once met a young woman doing a PhD in Eastern European history. In good faith, I asked her about the Srebrenica genocide, and she accused me of using it as ‘an anti-feminist talking point’. So if being anti-male-genocide is “anti feminist”, what does that say about feminism?

NAILED IT: Jeff Bezos: “A nurse in Queens who makes $75K a year pays more than $12K a year in taxes. Does that really make sense?” “So people talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens NOT pay taxes? At all!” “Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75K a year paying more than $1K a month in taxes?” “That’s $1K a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything.” “And by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes. It’s only 3%.” “We can find 3%. So we don’t have... it’s a small amount of money for the government. You know that. And the more I thought about it, to me, it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this.” “We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington — they should be sending her an apology. It really makes no sense.” Exactly!

Australia Academia "Mentoring in the academy is a laudable exercise, but it continues to be shaped by powerful institutional infrastructures of inherited, white, patriarchal privilege...Building on feminist and queer scholarship that problematises mentoring programs within academia, we position space and its gendered relations as central to mentoring experiences; detailing the material, discursive, metaphorical and emotional entanglements that frame both dominant mentoring practices and possibilities for alternative feminist forms of mentoring. As a form of creative disruption Jack Halberstam’s architectural concept of ‘unworlding’ underpins our analysis, examining spaces where resilience and resistance thrive, where gendered bodies reclaim space and visibility, and alternative ways of doing and being can flourish. Within these broadened spaces, we reimagine feminist mentoring as a means of creation, disruption and protest."