This is edition 2026/154 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: How both sides could game MMP
Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project
- 🗳 Right-wing talk: National electorate vote, party vote Act or NZ First, to manufacture an MMP overhang and grow Parliament for the coalition.
- 📊 National ~30% party vote vs 44 electorate seats held. David Farrar: accidental overhang "plausible but not probable." Ashley Church spells the arithmetic.
- 🧮 Overhang: win more electorates than party-vote entitlement and Parliament expands. No compensating cuts to rivals. Present House already 123 MPs from prior overhangs.
- 📣 Don Brash, Ani O'Brien, Ashley Church, Peter Williams, NZ First activists pushing variants. Oliver Hartwich: one in nine National party voters shifting could tip a majority.
- 🚫 Not National policy. Chris Bishop says voters would punish the game. Strategy could wipe National list MPs and turbocharge Act/NZ First at National's expense.
- 🏷 Te Pāti Māori already there: Gisborne launch prioritised candidate votes; Waititi told Parliament they will create the next overhang. Party votes nudged to Labour/Greens.
- ⚖ Graeme Edgeler: electoral norms, not just rules. The Post editorial: within the rules, "best described as cheating." Jack Vowles warns of legitimacy crisis hitting Māori seats.
- 🎯 Takeaway: both blocs now eye the overhang loophole. Accidental disproportion is one thing. Organised gaming of proportionality is another.
2. Labour’s Fiscal Vision Board
Liam Hehir - The Blue Review
- 🧾 Labour's fiscal strategy: more spending, debt somehow falling, and a vibe that it all adds up. Hehir says the sums do not.
- 📈 Treasury baseline 2029/30: core Crown spend ~$168b (~30% of GDP), revenue ~$174b, modest surplus on current settings.
- 💸 Labour would let core Crown expenses rise to 33% of GDP. On Treasury GDP (~$554b), that is roughly +$15b a year by decade's end.
- 🏠 Big new tax named: capital gains on investment and commercial property. Labour's own numbers: ~$0.965b in 2029/30, rising to ~$1.35b later.
- 🔢 Spend up ~2.7% of GDP. CGT revenue under a quarter of a percent of GDP. About one dollar in eleven of the new spend bill.
- 📈 Bracket creep already baked into forecasts. Unless Labour wants a lot more inflation, stealth tax rises do not close the gap.
- 🏋️ Fitness analogy: cut BMI from 33 to 20 while raising calories and adding a five-minute walk. Vision board, not a plan.
- 🎯 Takeaway: eat more, move less, claim you get fitter. Debt fairy tales dressed as strategy.
3. RODNEY HIDE: The “Single Source of Truth” Collapses
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🧪 Lab-leak talk once got you banned and branded a public-health threat. Official gospel: bat, pangolin, wet market. Wuhan lab questions equal "disinformation."
- ⚖ 18 Aug 2026: Dr David Morens, long-time senior adviser to Anthony Fauci at NIAID, pleaded guilty in US federal court to conspiracy to defraud the United States.
- 📁 Charge: scheme to hide federal records on COVID-19 origins and related research grants after NIH killed EcoHealth's bat-coronavirus grant tied to Wuhan.
- 📧 Sensitive talk moved to personal Gmail to dodge FOIA. Earlier emails: how to "make emails disappear." Also admitted illegal gratuities (including wine) tied to grant restoration and lab-leak pushback.
- 🔒 While citizens took lockdowns and mandates, officials shielded the paper trail linking US funding to high-risk coronavirus work in Wuhan.
- 🔬 "Science evolved" is not the whole story. What changed was the ability of powerful people to keep evidence off the table. Early pattern-recognition got smeared.
- 🇳🇿 NZ press amplified the overseas consensus. Sceptics framed as threats. Institutional trust takes the hit when debate is treated as a security risk.
- 🎯 Takeaway: courtroom admissions beat quiet media corrections. The "conspiracy theorists" were demanding the transparency the system refused.
4. DON BRASH: EXPLAINING MY VOTE
Don Brash - Brash & Mitchell
- 📋 Brash scores the Coalition on six criteria near election. Year-ago mark was 2.5/5. Now 3.5/6: better than the alternative, not sparkling.
- ✅ Credit: RMA rewrite and fast-track, education reset (NCEA, reading, charter schools), housing affordability (Auckland median multiple ~11 to ~8).
- 🏠 Irony: cheaper houses help kids and growth, and tank incumbents. Owners want falls for others, not themselves.
- ⚖ Treaty/equal citizenship: some wins (MACA amendment, s127 education cut, Māori ward referenda, tougher grievance terms). Misses: Treaty Principles Bill killed, weak ward campaign, no scrap of Māori seats.
- 💰 Fiscal: inherited a mess, failed to fix the track or sell the need. Super age untouched thanks to Peters. KiwiSaver mandate does not solve ageing costs.
- 🌏 Foreign policy: fail. Nailed to the US mast, Taiwan Strait sails, AUKUS Pillar 2 talk, muted Iran critique. China not a military threat unless NZ joins the porch fight.
- 🗳 Vote advice: electorate National (except Epsom for ACT), party vote ACT or NZ First to manufacture centre-right overhang. Brash's own party vote: ACT.
- 🚫 Won't back NZ First: Super age refusal, BNZ buy idea, dual-mandate monetary talk, Jones/Peters China lines.
- 🎯 Takeaway: prefer this Coalition to Labour-Greens-TPM-TOP. Split the tickets if you want the right to govern under MMP maths.
5. The fake poll epidemic
Patrick Ruffini - The Intersection
- 📉 Week's arc: bad polls to fabricated ones. "Median Strategies" was a 21-year-old's "social experiment" (Rahil Prakash). Media and campaigns still cited the numbers.
- 🧪 Public Sentiment Institute admitted fabricating data by switching votes between candidates, including one they lied about working for. Founder in felony pre-trial diversion in Miami-Dade.
- 💰 Prediction markets pay for moving thin races a few points. Generative AI builds plausible firm websites overnight.
- 📱 Hobbyist thirst for any poll plus media retreat from expensive surveying lets fly-by-night shops into the averages. Cheap is not 100x worse, so junk survives.
- 🗳️ Nate Silver's FLIPR more bullish on Dem Senate gains than peers. Summer Trump-era midterm polls still lean too Democratic early, even if they tighten later.
- 🔮 Markets show pro-incumbent bias and underprice women in Dem primaries. Election-night traders also misread California/Wisconsin progressive surges.
- 📈 Household costs dashboard: many daily expenses up far beyond CPI since 2019 even where mortgages only edged up ~3%.
- 🧠 EEG note: writing with AI compared neurologically to drunk driving at twice the legal limit. Impairment can compound.
- 🎯 Takeaway: when polls become content farms for markets and timelines, fabrication is the next product feature.
6. How to Speak to Climate Bedwetters
James Delingpole - Delingpole
- 🌤 Times columnist blamed climate sceptics for a hot spell. Delingpole's Spectator reply: weather is not climate; do not nuke the economy over CO2-as-thermostat theory.
- 📚 Same 101 points as his 2012 book Watermelons: for Normie audiences. Awake readers get the fuller, stranger map.
- 🧪 Author's private thesis: prolonged heat is "man-made" via weather-manipulation programmes (HAARP, NEXRAD, chemtrails). He says you cannot say that in mainstream without looking mad.
- 🤖 Comment sections, he claims, are bot/intel territory for "manufactured doubt," including regular digs at his wider beliefs.
- 🏦 Update dilemma for Watermelons: Rockefeller role in teeing up the scare, elite weather tech, and darker Cabal claims. He put it all in.
- 🗣 Why mention the darkest stuff? Normies ask "why would they?" Money and power alone are incomplete if the actors already have both.
- 📰 Still writes for Spectator and similar: not for the pay (he says it is dismal), but to reach people who never open conspiracy Substacks.
- 🤝 Plea against Awake purity spirals that exile Normie family and friends. Isolationism, he says, copies elite snobbery.
- 🎯 Takeaway: two registers. Cot-level climate 101 for the centre; full weirdness for the already awake. Pick the room.
7. The Cruelty of DEI
Jeffrey Tucker - The Epoch Times
- 💔 Cambridge education sociologist Jason Arday died by suicide amid an investigation of his intellectual credibility after years as a media darling.
- 🤫 Whisper network long said he was not the genius sold. A US academic pressed plagiarism and embellishment claims. The tissue collapsed.
- 🏛 Youngest black professor with a named chair: Tucker frames the appointment as DEI/identity privilege, not unique, and disastrous when standards return.
- ⚖ DEI as mutated affirmative action: resentment for the bypassed, hidden contempt for beneficiaries, institutionalised discrimination by identity.
- 👤 Parallel anecdote: a black university VP who knew his diversity post was token, fundraising on a poverty-to-prestige script he was tired of telling.
- 🎓 Pipeline of unearned acceleration: admissions, grades, PhD, titles. Refuse and lose the game; accept and lose genuine respect.
- 🏢 Pattern bled into corporates, banks, media, arts. Object and risk the racist smear. Whistleblowers broken; players left living the lie.
- 🪂 Not Icarus: catapulted without a parachute. When the standards police arrived, humiliation was total for playing a fake system everyone knew was fake.
- 🎯 Takeaway: DEI demeans the bypassed, the whistleblowers, and the supposed winners. Unmerited exaltation is cruelty with a smile.
8. Islamism and the silence of the ‘progressives’
Owen Shapell - spiked
- 🚐 Berlin, 25 July 2026: Abdul Ballout drove a van into Christopher Street Day closing party near Brandenburg Gate. One dead, 29 hurt, then a machete on survivors.
- 📋 German state had watched him for years: assault, IS propaganda, Lebanon/Syria enlistment bid. Deradicalisation logged a performance. Still drafting exit when he struck. Attended 2 of 26 sessions.
- 💬 Instant script: do not let it divide us; warn against "instrumentalising" Muslim hatred; pivot to AfD and funding cuts. Dead woman named, then sidelined by paragraph three.
- 🔁 Circularity: respectable people will not discuss Islamism, so only the AfD does, which then "proves" the topic was always disreputable.
- 🗞 Some German left press and Muslim scholars did name Islamism fast. That undercuts the claim only reactionaries may say it.
- 🕌 "Nothing to do with Islam" asserts a single essence no imam can own. Better questions: which reading, whom, where, funded how.
- 🇬🇧 UK precedent: Birmingham primary protests against LGBT picture books, injunctions against false paedophile smears, years of soft focus on the threat to gay people.
- 🎯 Takeaway: assessment existed. Action did not. Progressive energy polices the reaction harder than the ideology that kills.
9. Harry and Meghan: return of the grifters
Julie Burchill - spiked
- ✈️ After six California years, Harry and Meghan head back to Britain. Burchill: distance did not make hearts grow fonder.
- 📉 Jam, reality TV, charity scandals. Spotify frankness: "The Fucking Grifters" was the podcast they should have launched.
- 🎭 Failed Enormodome act returning to Richmond record-shop showcases. Heartsick homecoming vs commercial retreat: which is it?
- 🎤 Spotify again: nobody cares what they say unless it is about the royals. Prior blabbermouth record, "recollections may vary."
- 📊 YouGov July: Meghan 22% positive / 65% negative. Harry 33% / 58%. Once the popular prince, now underwater.
- 🛡 Security song-and-dance that justified leaving now faces a colder British public. Hollywood A-list cooled; Love, Meghan's best get was Mindy Kaling.
- 👑 Society climb stalled. Beckham-queue royal fealty means BAFTA tables may stay empty. York cousins cool; Uncle Andrew swerved.
- 🎯 Takeaway: not a triumph. A double-act that overestimated the market and is coming home to a smaller room.
10. Do politicians have the right to block citizens on social media?
Alexandra Marshall - The Spectator Australia
- 🚫 Marshall keeps landing on politicians' block lists after calling out tax grabs. Private accounts can shut the door. Official ones are different.
- 🏛 Elected accounts run on taxpayer-paid labour and act as public buildings for policy announcements, not private lounges.
- 📱 As legacy media withers, social is the first contact point. Blocking critics is blocking digital protest in the square.
- 📣 Why it happens: critical reply threads trash the "awesome tax cut" graphic. Left marches in streets; conservatives often protest from the lounge.
- ⚖ Feels like a hit on implied freedom of political communication, even if the doctrine predates social platforms.
- ✅ Sensible carve-outs: threats of violence (also ToS bans); maybe foreign flood accounts drowning domestic citizens.
- 🔒 Worse: reply-locked posts from politicians who still preach free speech. All sides block; pandemic health ministers did too while people were housebound.
- 🗳 Speccie Facebook poll leaning hard "no." Terrible policy should be shouted down before it becomes law.
- 🎯 Takeaway: block button is fine for private homes. On official politics accounts it is a quiet veto of the public.
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