This is edition 2026/139 of the Ten@10 newsletter.
Hi all,
This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.
Enjoy!
1. Democracy Briefing: The 13 Days That Could Decide the Election
Bryce Edwards — The Democracy Project
- 📅 Enrolment now closes midnight Sun 25 Oct — before advance voting starts — tightest deadline in decades; not a return to pre-2020 rules.
- 📊 Commission: ~55k party votes may be disallowed; ~73k lose electorate vote at old address. Cooke: 55k ≈ two seats — “the election was stolen” meme waiting to load.
- 🗣️ Goldsmith: faster count + “plenty of time”; Stephenson: “lazy… vote to tax other people’s money”; Seymour: “dropkicks”; Woodham: “stay home.”
- 🧒 2023: a third of 18–19s enrolled/updated in voting period; 48% of Māori that age — young, renters, Māori/Pasifika/Asian most exposed.
- 🎯 Takeaway (Duncan): specials lean left and they know who misses out — “intentional voter suppression.” (Further sections paywalled.)
2. Stop the Madness
Peter Allan Williams
- 🦃 Simon Watts’ “Head Start” amalgamation deadline: turkeys don’t vote for Christmas — Taupō, Tararua, Rangitīkei told the minister to get stuffed.
- 🏔️ Central Otago wants nothing of Queenstown Lakes: tourism gem ruined by greed; SH6 crawl; $650m debt; Ridgeburn 1,400 + Homestead Bay 2,800 homes without Shotover/Kawarau bridges or sewers that don’t dump into the river.
- 💸 Clutha ~$156m debt on 19k people; CODC ~$50m with surpluses — why climb into financial cot cases?
- 📜 Fix LGA 2002 first: prescribe duties, water free of iwi grift, regional back-office — smaller/leaner, not shotgun marriages; freeze QT consents until infrastructure exists.
- 🎯 Takeaway: biased Central Otago ratepayer? Yes. Improved by QLDC? No. Should have done a Taupō.
3. Douglas Murray: Europe’s Borderless Dream Becomes a Nightmare
Douglas Murray — The Free Press
- 🌊 60,000+ migrants into tiny Spanish Ceuta from Morocco in 24 hours — most vivid illustration yet of the decade that remade Europe’s face and politics.
- 📅 Echo of 2015: Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das,” million-plus via Greece/Italy soft underbelly; Spain then quieter thanks to Morocco deals and eastern routes.
- 🗺️ Geography trap remains: Ceuta and Melilla sit in North Africa — short sail + enclaves = permanent vulnerability when agreements crack.
- 🎯 Takeaway: will Ceuta jar elites awake, or more denial and failed solutions? (Free portion; full piece paywalled.)
4. Pre-electoral Coalition Speculation: Who Will Work with Whom?
Grant Duncan — Politics Happens
- 🚫 Luxon rules out TOP: message to centre-right that TOP = Hipkins four-party — hoping to keep them under 5% (Motu model: 56.1% chance over — coin toss).
- 🔄 Qiulae Wong still open both ways: “they might need us… their tune might change” — won’t say if land tax/citizen’s income get dropped for National.
- 🎲 MMP’s favourite spectator sport since 1996: the dance card of “who will work with whom” — high stakes, few rules, journalists love the squirm.
- 🎯 Takeaway: free portion frames the game; full map of deals and traps is paywalled.
5. That’s Not the Point, Prime Minister
Natalia Albert — Less Certain
- ⚖️ Luxon’s TOP rule-out isn’t about tax rates — it’s abandoning MMP’s job: build coalitions across difference before cohesion cracks past repair.
- 🪞 Hipkins no better: only “simple targeted CGT… as far as we’re going” — both called the most irresponsible major leaders she’s watched in 15 years.
- 📖 Back on Track (2023): Luxon should have backed Manji/Ilam as Key backed Seymour/Epsom — missed centrist bridge; she ran for TOP to disrupt polarisation, not the reverse.
- 🔑 Key 2008: didn’t need Māori Party, brought them in anyway — broader = calmer legitimacy. TOP isn’t in yet; honest move is let voters decide, not call the result early.
- 🎯 Takeaway: every pre-emptive rule-out hollows the centre and hands the extremes the rope. Fuck that.
6. Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance
Rodney Hide — Brash & Mitchell
- 📘 Open Society (written in NZ, WWII): unlimited tolerance of the intolerant destroys tolerance — defend the conditions of openness without banning private belief.
- ⚖️ Classical Sharia as public legal system rejects sex/belief equality, apostasy freedom, individual rights over religious authority — parallel systems = one-way concession.
- 👁️ Full niqab: free dress vs non-negotiable institutional accommodation that signals sex segregation and empties “empowerment” of women’s equal public personhood.
- 🇳🇿 Same principle on ancestry: honour Māori heritage; refuse permanent co-governance/race-based power that divides by bloodline and erodes equal citizenship.
- 🎯 Takeaway: openness without limit is already marching via pink-haired kindness and humble bigot-callers. Words, while we still can.
7. Neither Saint Nor Villain
Andrew Sullivan — The Weekly Dish
- 😶 Fauci at hearing: flat, haunted, mute behind pardon — “attacks on me are attacks on science” meets perjury-trap caution.
- ⚖️ Blame split: Paul’s spittle demonisation + diary leak is gutter; Democratic/media worship + Tapper tongue-bath hurt him more — diary is AAA-list galas, Julia Roberts flowers, Atlas as “causing problems.”
- 🧪 Lab-leak smear-to-certainty in days; GOF champion with Wuhan grant; IFR private 0.2–0.3% vs public 1%; noble lie on masks; Great Barrington “total nonsense” vs Collins’ humility on ignorance.
- 🎯 Takeaway: dent the halo, don’t join the Epstein-level lynch mob. Blame shading truth, smearing dissent, champagne as others died alone — and forgive the human in a plague with an unfit president.
8. When Fame Comes for the Self-Obsessed
Alex Berenson — Unreported Truths
- 📱 Apr 2020 thread about a doomsaying epi who loves the cameras while hospitals empty and lockdowns wreck jobs — turned out to fit Fauci better than anyone.
- 📔 Diary: “most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable… in the world” — not delusion; he earned it by keeping fear high past when he knew risk was modest under-75.
- 🧲 Twin drivers by April: unslakable fame + push to bury lab-leak of research he helped fund — fame the stronger thirst; Greek tragedy in a white coat; we paid.
- 📰 Even the NYT mocked status/self-regard rising with the death toll — king’s Jake Tappers can’t reassemble the reputation.
- 🎯 Takeaway: no prison, but the halo’s gone. He still believes truth matters. Hope he’s right this time.
9. Viewing Borders as Immoral, Spanish Leader Followed Biden Footsteps
Michael Shellenberger — Public
- 🚢 Ceuta: 50k+ in 24h, 57 dead crushed/drowned; Sánchez blames traffickers + Morocco — days earlier celebrated 1.2m illegal-arrival amnesty applications and NYT “West Needs Migrants.”
- 📉 Spain pop +23% since 2000 (3× W Europe avg), all immigration; 29% of 25–49 foreign-born; 10% unemployment = surplus not shortage; foreign productivity −20%; second-gen edu lag; housing = #1 voter worry.
- 💸 Amnesty processing €505m; FAMI ~€900m; pension math needs ~24m working-age immigrants/30yrs while foreign unemployment ~20% vs 12% native.
- 🧠 Ideology over evidence: borders = oppression, nationalism = fascism; Soros/Open Society global citizenship + socialist anti-nation — can’t learn from Biden without rewriting what “good person” means.
- 🎯 Takeaway: France/Italy threaten Schengen checks; 57 bodies are a hard sell as compassion. Spain needs a new PM.
10. After Fauci Debacle, Our Idiot Press Circles the Wagons
Matt Taibbi — Racket News
- 🤐 Paul: why fund dangerous research in China? Fauci Fifths ~100 times — NYT still: Paul as “Joe McCarthy,” hearing “useless drama.”
- 🧬 Bat virus that can’t infect bats + furin cleavage site; Andersen “friggin’ likely”; Redfield: remove FCS, no pandemic. EcoHealth/Wuhan grant under 2014 freeze, then P3CO loophole (wild pathogens “not GoF”).
- 📔 Diary: EcoHealth pathogenicity up “still does not… trigger P3CO”; Zheng-Li Shi GOF on spike/ACE2 — “we could not let this go.”
- ❤️ Press as anti-Trump church: Fauci votives, “heartthrob,” Pitt on SNL, Baez portrait; WaPo “Republican pile-on” after the Fifths.
- 🎯 Takeaway: you can’t hate the news media enough. Blue-state heartthrob in the frame = half the country filibusters a disaster investigation. God help us next time.
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