These Interesting Times
The Blog of Peter Forsythe in Hong Kong
Tuesday, 7 July 2026
Happy 250th America! X marks the spot...
Monday, 6 July 2026
The Universe … from Lake Forsythe
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| “Night sky from a lonely beach in New Zealand”. Milky Way with the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds |
Taken by Ekant Veer, professor at University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
It’s taken from Birdlings Flat, near Lake Forsythe (!) located right at the base of the Banks Peninsula just south of Christchurch.
Places my ancestors came to in the mid 19th century.
The Magellanic “Clouds” — actually galaxies — are two of our closest galactic neighbours in our Local Group of galaxies. In about a billion years they’ll merge into our own Milky Way, to become part of our spiral arms and add to the 400 billion or so Stars we already have.
I’ve looked at this very same night sky, the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, from offshore East Coast Australia, in a racing yacht, Sydney-Hobart. The southern night skies are glorious.
Are we alone? Are we, mammals on Earth, alone in this vast universe? I used to think “certainly not”. Star number: at least 8 x 10 with 23 zeros. And more planets than even this vast number of Stars. What are the odds? Surely there must be life, intelligent life, elsewhere! Surely….
But maybe not. The very-very-very odd combination of random events that led to Homo Sapiens on Planet Earth may well be too random for even such a vast number of Stars and Planets to guarantee another civilisation. We may well be alone. Even if not alone, we’ll never be able to communicate with an intelligent alien species. The distances are simply too vast. The physics too brutal.
We, Homo Sapiens, are the consciousness of the universe. We are the only one we know, so far. We may very possibly the only one. Better care for it. Better nurture “the light of consciousness”.
Happy Birthday, America!
Sunday, 5 July 2026
Should we be scared of AI?
Well, not of AI. As in “Artificial Intelligence”. I’m not saying we should be scared of that.
But Artificial Super Intelligence? Perhaps we need not be literally “scared”. But concerned? Yes. We ought be concerned. We ought to consider, very seriously indeed, its potential dangers.
I’m not talking Luddite stuff. Tolpuddle Martyrs stuff. I’m not talking “AI will take away my job” stuff.
I’m talking existential. As in: life threatening. As in: a threat to the survival of humanity itself.
This is not being a “retard”. Plenty of super smart people worry about it. Chief amongst them Elon Musk, himself a major owner of AI. His concern about the existential threat led to his funding OpenAI, to be public, open to public scrutiny, of understanding its dangers. But which was hijacked by Sam Altman, litigated… but that’s another story.
I’m reposting the above video I posted in February. I rewatched it last night. It’s a good summary of the issues, in short film format.
There’s a follow up to “Writing Doom”, by Suzy Shepherd: Seat at the Table
And for a deeper dive, there’s Roman Yampolskiy talking to Steven Bartlett about AI Safety: Only 5 Jobs left in 2030
There’s a non-zero chance ASI could wipe out Homo Sapiens. Perhaps a non-trivial chance.
Surely we should look at it? Discuss it? Without worrying that we’re becoming EU-apparatchik worrywarts?
Saturday, 4 July 2026
Happy Birthday, America!
Friday, 3 July 2026
Huge Worldwide Poverty Reductions
The huge increase in the world population NOT living in poverty (the Green above) began after mid 1970s. A big chunk of it from China expanding market forces. Aka Capitalism.
Everywhere in the world that things go better, where the poor get richer, where the rich also get richer, in every single case it’s down to capitalism. ,
“But isn’t China socialist?”. “Didn’t China have huge growth since 1980?”. Yes to both. But but…. The growth wasn’t down to socialism. It was and is, very simply, because the Communist Party allowed the market to expand. It was market expansion, aka capitalism, that grew the growth.
China has been economically successful to the exact extent that it has allowed market forces to operate.
I saw that with my own eyes on the ground in China, from the 1970s to now.
Whenever China shifts back to more Party control, growth stops or slows. We’ve seen it. I’ve seen it, lived it, experienced it.
That’s the reality of the world in the last century. Capitalism works.. Socialism doesn’t.
It’s Capitalism all the time, all the way.
Thursday, 2 July 2026
SpaceX > R.O.W.
For the Year to June 2026:
SpaceX launches: 76. Successful: 100%
Rest of World (ROW) launches: 49. Successful: 88%.
Elon Musk has done what was unthinkable, even “impossible” a decade ago. A private individual launching rockets… then a private individual launching and retrieving rockets… then a privately individual launching more rockets than the ROW combined. At 100% success. And retrieving, reusing them.
But… you know, “Elon bad”. Because he thinks, as I do, that the Democratic Party in America has gone lala-loopy crazy left, full-on Socialist. Anti-democratic hard-authoritarian Left. Not me saying this: they, the Dems, say it themselves, loud and proud.
Meanwhile. You have something you need to put in space? How do you like your odds if you don’t use SpaceX? Because you don’t like Elon. How do you like the 12% chance of losing your precious cargo…?
Wednesday, 1 July 2026
Happy "Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day"
The girls above, on our very own Discovery Bay beach, July 1, 1997, will now be in their early thirties! Wearing Hong Kong bauhinia flag and Union Jack shirts. Behind them, folks wearing China and British flag shirts. Credit: South China Morning Post.
Happy "Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day". A Hong Kong holiday.
28 29 years ago that Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese government, by the UK government.
In Chinese it's 回归, Hui Gui, which is much simpler and much more descriptive. It means "the return of Hong Kong to our beloved motherland".
28 29 years ago, last night, Jing and I sat in a Wanchai Bar, watching the proceedings. All the Chinese army waiting on the Shenzhen side, to cross over into Hong Kong on the stroke of midnight.
It was a very wet, rainy night. Prince Charles was here for the handover, and famously described the Chinese bureaucrats at the ceremony as "appalling old wax works". It would be good if he was as honest today about Islam in Britain as he was then about those appallling Chinese apparatchiks.
Jing was pregnant with John, who was born two weeks later.
The Chinese largely kept out of Hong Kong politics, until forced to do so by the riots of 2019. But even then, I think it's fair to say, they handled that with a light hand, given what they could have done and many people, including people here in Hong Kong, were calling for them to do.
One simple thing to note: unlike most post-colonial places, Beijing has not demanded the change of a single name of a single street or building in Hong Kong. It's still Victoria Harbour, Victoria Park, Queen Elizabeth street, Pottinger St, Des Voeux road, and so on. I'd guess there's been more renaming in Australia than here in Hong Kong.
Tuesday, 30 June 2026
Western Civilisation’s Failure | Katharine Birbalsingh
Monday, 29 June 2026
Conservative Black Voices mentioned on my blog
Allen West
Amala Ekpunobi
Briahna Joy Gray
Byron Donalds
Carol M. Swain
Chloe Valdary
Christian Watson
Clarence Thomas
Coleman Hughes
Condoleezza Rice
David Webb
Delano Squires
Esther Krakue
Glenn Loury
Greg Foreman (YT: "Black Conservative Perspective")
Ian Rowe
Jason Riley
John McWhorter
John Ogbu
Kemi Badenoch
Larry Elder
Morgan Freeman
Nathaniel Broughty (YT: "Nate the Lawyer")
Shelby Steele
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thomas Sowell
Tim Scott
Walter Williams
Wilfred Reilly
Zuby
Sunday, 28 June 2026
Freedom Redux
My post from 15 years ago. We’d been cruising our yacht, Xena, around Thailand, having just done the King’s Cup regatta, in December 2010. With friends from Oz, Barry and Theresa.
“So what brought you to Phuket”, I asked Pieter, the septuagenarian Dutchman we were chatting with at the Yacht Haven dockside.
He thinks a bit, rubs his chin and teeth, and says “Freedom”.What sort of freedom did he have here in Thailand that he didn’t have in Holland?, I asked.He pointed to his ochre-red shorts, sun-faded, and said that’s all he wore during the day. As night fell he put on a shirt. When he rode his motorbike, he was helmetless. That sort of freedom, he said. To be oneself, and not mollycoddled by a Nanny-state bureaucracy, or stifled by peer pressure to dress this way or that.We knew what he meant, having just been to the Similan Islands and climbed Sail Rock, which would give palpitations to the Occupational Health and Safety bureaucrats. Indeed, it would not be allowed without a “proper” path and fences around the precipitous drops.Instead, in free Thailand, there’s a rickety path, occasional wooden steps, ropes studded with rusting nails, and the top is a clear vertiginous rock, the edge of which I couldn’t even go near. But if I’d wanted to, I could’ve. It's your own responsibility; you look after yourself.This brought to mind another Freedom connection…
Spoiler: it’s the inverse connection between the percent of people in a country who follow Islam and that country’s Freedom Index.
Saturday, 27 June 2026
Hamas are the real Nazis
Alexandra Marshall
The Left running around calling small government, capitalist, social conservatives 'Nazis' while praising Palestine ... the county whose leadership ACTUALLY sided with the real Nazis while conservatives were off fighting Hitler.
You seriously could not make this crap up.
We are living in psycho world run by the delusional spawn of angry communist professors.
And the media nods along because they'll print literally anything to bring about the Big State, endless gravy train ticket of Labor's socialist utopia. [Link]
She’s 100% correct.
In WWII, the leader of the Muslims of the Middle East was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Huseini. I’ve read a book about him, called “Hitler’s Mufti”. He spent the war in Berlin, a guest of Adolf Hitler, broadcasting on radio wild Jew-hatred to his captive Middle East followers. He organised Muslims into S.S. Army units to help the Germans liquidate Jews in Eastern Europe. He told Hitler that he would “take care of the Jews in the Middle East” once Hitler had done the job in Europe.
Al Huseini was -- and still is -- a hero to Muslims in the Middle East. Yasser Arafat was a distant relative and idolised him. By some measures he’s the foundational root of the venemous Jew hatred that only allows “No” as an answer, to never acccpet Jews as neighbours, to kill them even when they “hide behind every tree”.
Hamas are Al-Huseini spawn. Direct.
It doesn’t matter, not to me, that the majority of people in the west seem to have been infected with Hamas’ Hatred of Jews. I mean, of course it matters. But it doesn’t mean that the majority is right. Just as all the millions of Brownshirts idolising Hitler didn’t mean they were right. Or that he was…
When I first mentioned Hamas 15 years ago in this blog, I noted their Nazi practices. They used the Roman Salute. They are supremacist. They hate Jews. HATE! Hitler woulda loved them! And today’s young western Hamas-nicks too.
Friday, 26 June 2026
Why “They” hate Elon
Brivael Le Pogam:
They do not hate Elon Musk despite his achievements. They hate him because of what those achievements expose.He is the living refutation of crony capitalism — the cozy, managed system where success flows not from building better things but from regulatory moats, lobbying access, subsidy capture, and the right friendships. That system wears the costume of "capitalism" while functioning as its opposite: a protection racket for incumbents, held together by red tape and quiet corruption, where the press, the regulators, and the entrenched giants all scratch one another's backs.
Shorter Brivael: they hate Musk because he exposes Crony Capitalism. Exposes its cushy, quiet, hidden, life. Exposes what amounts to a massive grift.
Thursday, 25 June 2026
Communist-Islamists win big in New York
Europe shifts Right...
| More Blue = more Right. More Red = more Left |
The left just normalized so much insanity that basic self-preservation now gets called “far right extremism.”
Decades of open borders and failed assimilation delivered parallel societies, welfare strain, and crime spikes in city after city.Green fanaticism delivered energy poverty and deindustrialization while virtue signaling.Woke ideology delivered confused kids, erased women, and attacks on national identity.And the result is voters across France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK and beyond are backing the parties the media smears as “far right.”Those parties are simply saying what was common sense centrist a generation ago.
Secure borders. Citizens first. Affordable energy. Law and order. Protect children. Preserve your culture.
The Overton window got dragged so far left that reality, sanity, and common sense now look radical.
The Overton window got dragged so far left that reality, sanity, and common sense now look radical. H/t: @Rothmus
Humanity's goal for the next century is... prevent WW3.*Elon: "Okay, this is going to sound pretty crazy.""I'd say the economy is 10 times the its current size in 10 years. Greater than. I feel like that's actually a fairly comfortable prediction.""Obviously if there's like World War III or something. that that could put a kink in those plans or those expectations. In the absence of World War III, if current trends continue, I would say the the economy 10xes in 10 years and we have a base on the moon." H/t: @PeterDiamindis
Wednesday, 24 June 2026
Americans Can’t Get Enough World Cup Attention | Bridget Phetasy
It's not rich vs poor, it's makers vs takers | David Friedberg
David Friedberg: It's not rich vs poor, it's makers vs takers.
The great lie is that there are two sides to society, that is the rich and the poor.
And the great truth is that there are two sides that are the makers and the takers.
The lie is that the rich are unfairly rich and the poor are unfairly poor, and therefore, the poor must take from the rich.
But the truth is that it's the takers that tell you that lie, that the real truth is that artists, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, computer scientists, people that build, people that make from all walks of life, all income levels, all wealth brackets, are the makers.
And the takers are what Sacks calls this intelligentsia, the analysts, the espousers, the armchair mechanics, the critics, the commentators, the politicians. They are the takers.
They are the people that watch the rest of society make stuff, build stuff, specifically doing things that create value for other people in society. That's what a maker is.
Who allocates capital better? Makers or Takers? Success-motivated individuals or power-obsessed governments? Case in point:
Tuesday, 23 June 2026
Europe will live
This continent hasn’t had its last word. It won’t. As long as one man remains to love what he has received, to want to pass it on intact, to prefer a hard truth to a comfortable lie—Europe will live.
Capitalist United States vs Socialist Europe
The bigger the circle the bigger the company. The bigger the cluster, the bigger the economy. Green are high-tech, blue all others.
Monday, 22 June 2026
Elon Musk the great inventor, builder, capitalist | WSJ
Elon Musk officially entered the canon of the greatest inventors, builders and capitalists not only of our time but arguably of humankind. What a time to be alive. What an extraordinary era to build, writes @EliseStefanik
The Truth About Elon Musk's Wealth | All-in pod and Steven Mark Ryan
Imagine Elon Musk is truly evil…
- Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson.
- Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX…. by Ashlee Vance.
- Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac.
- The Book of Elon, by Eric Jorgenson.








