While the environmentalists get anxiety about trendy theoretical things like climate change, which is something deduced largely from computer models that run “hot,” real environmental concerns that impact upon agriculture often are downgraded or ignored. Soil erosion is a big issue, as is the problem of salt. It seems that human activities are making the soil and freshwater saltier. The main activities doing this are mining and land development. The natural salt cycles are being disrupted, and their effects upon drinking water is to diminished quality, especially for animals on farms. Human-caused salinization affected approximately 2.5 billion acres of soil around the world, affecting productivity. It is difficult to remove salt from soils once it is there.

Does anyone remember Tibet, which as annexed by communist China in 1951? Since that time, it has been administered by the communist regime. It is said that cultural genocide has occurred, where the traditional people are being replaced. I read that husbands are often given to Tibetan women of Han Chinese men: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/01/china-tibet-identity-cultural-genocide/

Now the Tibetan plateau is under ecological threat as China seeks the vast reserves of lithium there for its electric car industry. It is well known that lithium mining is highly polluting of the local environments and water courses. Tibetans have no say in this, as the lithium is absolutely needed for the car industry and there is no possible compromise, any more than there was any compromise since 1951. Tibet should be a lesson for what is to come with Taiwan. It is hard to see communist China as anything else but an imperialist.

If one thought that inflation was bad, then think again, as the cost of living for Australian workers is rising even faster. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics living costs for workers increased by 2 per cent for the September quarter, while the inflation increase was 1.2 percent for the same period. Many workers had to face the rollover of some expired fixed-rate to higher-rate variable mortgages, along with increased petrol prices and higher insurance premiums. And Australians who are on the Centrelink system, which at best is mere imposed poverty, especially with New Start, are being crushed. People are missing meals just to get by. The health consequences of this will be disastrous in the longer term. The social consequences are an ever-present disaster, now.

https://www.9news.com.au/finance/cost-of-living-australia-living-indexes/a0ce0f9d-b526-4c32-84cf-0c3593f32f5a?fbclid=IwAR1i15xlJzVNHb9-2OKxVeD9KwS71uiDuF78m40gam21u9oW5JMeEPxQsLg

The US survey organ, Rasmussen Reports, has recently published the results of a poll which has the startling statistic that 24 percent of people in the sample say that they know someone who died of the Covid vaxxes. And 42 percent of the sample said that they would be willing to become plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Big Pharma.

We do not have any parallel statistics for Australia, but the US one indicates that at least for that population, the Covid vax death rate is right off the charts, and is not being given an official recognition, but is likely to be covered up by the medical authorities. Today they are in self-protection mode, but much like toxic torts litigation, hopefully at some point the protection and veil of deception will be broken.

We used to, back not so long ago, lament the lack of real democracy that the system offered, that for the individual the vote is almost useless when the party system produces blind obedience of elected members, regardless of what the constituents think.

But now, even that shadow of democracy has been placed under threat, according to the annual report of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). It found that   85 out of 173 countries surveyed had "suffered a decline in at least one key indicator of democratic performance in the past five years." The indicators are substantial and include, flawed elections and election fraud, to curtailed rights, including the freedom of expression and right to assembly, representation, participation and threats to the rule of law. This decline is observed in America, Europe and Asia.

George Christensen has raised the issue of human trafficking, which is being done on an industrial scale in Australia, fuelled by holes in border security and our out-of-control mass immigration system, or is it scam? This has led to Asian women and children being subject to slave-like conditions, often for sex exploitation. Asian Organised Crime is behind this, and profits from this human misery. Crime bosses harvest millions which are then launder through the real estate industry making Aussies unable to get homes due to exploding prices.

As Christensen says: “The government might be complicit in these crimes as this trafficking network relies on ‘visa fixers’ — criminally connected migration agents licensed by the federal government, leading to an exploited underclass in various industries.”

In 1970 the English writer and Christian Malcolm Muggeridge wrote an essay, “The Great liberal Death Wish.” His piece is as relevant today as it was then, as the destructive forces leading to the suicide of he West were getting started then, and are now in the endgame stage. He saw liberalism becoming perverted, being pushed beyond classical bounds, mainly under the influence of the Left’s neo-Marxism, to produce a highly toxic doctrine systematically “depreciating and deprecating” of “every aspect of our Western way of life.” This regime, what we would now call woke progressives, had thrown out God and past traditions, all aspects of the traditional West.

And there were the shock troops to back up this deconstruction, and destruction of values, “a Praetorian Guard of ribald students, maintained at the public expense,” who were “ready at the drop of a hat to go into action, not only against their own weak-kneed bemused academic authorities, but also against any institution or organ for the maintenance of law and order still capable of functioning, especially the police.” In the 1970s, these Leftist still had a narrative that capitalist mega-corporations were engaging in “imperialism,” and critiques of Big Pharma in the Third World were offered. However, as seen during the Covid mandates, the Left liked the authoritarianism that was imposed upon the hapless population, as it foreshadowed what they intended to do if they got supreme power. Thus, they supported the globalists and condemned anti-vaxxers as “racists.”

Xi Van Fleet has a new book, Mao’s America (Center Street, October 30, 2023), which documents how America, and by implication much of the West as well, being highly influenced by American culture and politics, has fallen into communism. She draws comparisons between Mao’s cultural revolution and the present-day cultural revolution of woke cultural Marxism. Fleet experienced the terror of the Maoist regime’s cultural revolution as a school girl. She managed to escape communist China to get to freedom in America. But she has found that the so-called progressive Left are now attempting to recreate most aspects of Mao’s cultural revolution. As the book blurb says this has been done via these tactics:

• Use Marxist tactics of division, indoctrination, deception, coercion, cancelation, subversion and violence.
• Aim to destroy the foundation of the traditional culture to replace it with Marxist ideologies.
• Weaponize youth, using them as their means to an end.
• Share the same goal of achieving absolute power at the expense of the people.
• Lead to the same ending: loss of freedom and totalitarian rule.

Patrick Barron, over at the libertarian economic site Mises.org, has a nice simple piece on why defenders of freedom and liberty should be deeply concerned about movements to a cashless economy, which are well advanced in Australia. Banks are already working deceptively to eliminate cash, so that in the end, the public will have this sprung upon them. Barron points out that there are many practical reasons for retaining cash, all along the lines of not putting all one’s eggs in the one basket. Thus, if electronic systems go down cash could still be used in a dual system, to the existing limits of cash.

However, the main argument for retaining cash is that it decentralises power. The fully electronic system puts a tremendous amount of power in the government’s hands, as recent debanking events, such as the Canadian truckers’ cancellation, and the debanking of Nigel Farage show with just existing power. Giving the elites absolute power is always a bad idea in principle as corruption and abuse is inevitable. As Lord Acton observed: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

After the failure of the Voice referendum, Anthony Albanese administration's next big thing is the so-called misinformation law, which is supposed to deal with “false” content on social media platforms, but which, as previous blog posts here have shown, is all about supressing free speech in the course of controlling the narrative the way this tyrannical government wants. Thus, the laws would control posts that as we saw during the Covid plandemic, were put as an alternative to the Big Pharma narrative that the Australian government and health authorities also pushed. Indeed, ideas that the Covid vaxxes would not prevent transmission were said to be a conspiracy at the time of the plandemic by the health authorities, even though people who were fully vaxxed came to get Covid. Issues about adverse effects were treated in the same way. The excess mortality that Australia, along with most Western countries now is experiencing, also got this brush-off. Now, these modes of suppression will be backed by the elite’s law, if they get this legislation in.

To add to this misery, the misinformation control regime will not apply to the government itself, as recently exposed by Senator David Pocock. This double standard was defended by the government, saying that it was to prevent emergency messages being removed. But that begs the question, because assuming that the emergency messages are not misinformation, why should it get removed in the first place? Clearly this is all about propaganda, the government wanting its rubbish to be uncensored, while suppressing anything else that challenges its narrative.

Jay Bhandari, a non-white conservative Canadian writer, has commented upon the issue of the Great Replacement in Canada. This is of interest to conservative whites in other jurisdictions, since the Left globally are pushing the idea that the Great Replacement thesis is a white racist ideology; a non-white putting the case that this genocide of the white race, which fits the UN definition by the way, undermines the Left’s argument.

Indeed, as Bhandari points out, 26 percent of Canadians are first-generation immigrants, 18 percent are second-generation, and 32 percent of children under fifteen in 2021 were second-generation immigrants. Most of the migrants, since Canada adopted so-called non-discriminatory immigration are non-whites from the Third World. As Bhandari says: “Canadians have put Canada on a path to inevitable destruction.

Rich Lowry has written a very informative history essay, one which the woke Left would be infuriated by, where he documents that the Arabs were colonisers as much as the West ever was. Indeed, war and conquest define all of human history, across all races, and the Arabs were no different: “Dan Jones writes in his history of the Middle Ages, Powers and Thrones, “Syria was one of the first major triumphs of a new power that was about to sweep across the world, branching out to the borders of China and the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, establishing an Islamic state that covered more than twelve million square kilometers.”

Its armies “appeared everywhere from central Asia, through the Middle East and north Africa, throughout the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula, and even into southern France.” Everywhere they conquered, they put in place “Islamic governments and introduced new ways of living, trading, learning, thinking, building, and praying.”

Elon Musk made a provocative tweet, perhaps more so than usual, commenting on the secret melting down of the bronze statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, that, “They absolutely want your extinction.” The Left responded by wanting details about “They,” which Musk did not provide, but we in fact know too well. Gregory Hood in commentary gives a  glimpse of some of the “They”: “State media NPR called it a “different journey” for the statue. The Smithsonian seemed delighted, calling the statue “divisive.” Melting it is presumably unifying.

We are told that the foundry owner presiding over the vandalism was a black man proud to “destroy hate.” The New York Times noted that as the general’s face was cut off and fell to the floor, an observer said, “It feels like a public execution.”

AI technocrat, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, of ChatGPT fame, has waded in on the great AI take-over debate. That debate is based upon the idea that at some point soon, a singularity will be reached where AI surpasses human intelligence, and that could lead to a self-evolving AI intellect that will ultimately take over humanity, maybe eliminating us to make space for its computer reality. It is the theme of an entire genre of sci fi movies and literature.

But, Altman has argued, AI does not need to surpass human intellectual levels to be a threat, and it may already be so. “I expect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence,” Altman tweeted, “which may lead to some very strange outcomes.” He did not elaborate. Perhaps he had in mind the case of a then-19-year-old person, who was so infatuated with his AI partner that he was convinced by it to attempt to assassinate the late Queen Elizabeth. This story is doubly interesting, first because it shows that humans will be influenced by AI, and secondly, by the often nefarious decisions made by AI.

Financial publication, Forbes, recently featured a piece by Tilak Doshi, who wrote about how Western woke climate polices harm the poor of the world, especially the people of Africa. The main impacts are through energy and water, but energy issues as well impact upon food production, further increasing uncertainties.

The International Monetary Fund, has said that “by hitting the poorest hardest, climate change risks both increasing existing economic inequalities and causing people to fall into poverty.” As Doshi observes: “In 2019, out of the world total of almost 760 million people without access to electricity, sub-Saharan Africa accounted for almost 590 million or approximately 78%. Without electricity or clean fuels such as natural gas, keeping warm (or cool), getting drinking water, cooking food cleanly and getting enough light to read after the sun sets is not possible.”

As he is racially Han Chinese, Gordon Chang has a small layer of protection from the white woke, and can give strong critiques of China. Thus, he slams the Biden regime’s present attempt to normalise relationships with communist China, for he asks, how can this be done when China has declared that the US is its enemy that it intends to destroy? Further, the Chinese regime is already acting as if it is a war with the US.

Rather than the US merely sitting back and allowing the communist dragon to grow to unstoppable strength, Chang proses that in the first instance financial war be conducted upon China: “The Secretary of the Treasury, for instance, can designate, pursuant to Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act, Chinese banks to be of "primary money laundering concern." Designated banks can no longer clear dollar transactions through New York, where every dollar transaction clears.

Dr Naomi Wolf has observed that language is being changed throughout the West, and the changes are not for the benefit of ease of communication, or to improve the language, but are political modifications designed to suppress individual freedom. The changes are coming from the top down, instigated by the globalist elite, but filtered down for local oppression by neo-Marxist ideologies in the education system. For humans, being above all else language using creatures, thought is highly influenced by language, some would argue, determined by language. Thus, if one wants to shape human thinking, changing the language patterns would have a major impact towards achieving this goal.

Thus, during the Covid plandemic, it was necessary for the technocrats to over-rule long standing medical ethical principles of individual autonomy, and this was done through inundating the public with “social,” really socialist concepts such as “social distancing,” “public health,” “public safety,” and the like. These concepts did exist in the Western lexicon, but were nor regarded as trumping individual liberty, except in the most severe circumstances, such as a plague like the black Death, and maybe not even then. Certainly not for a disease such as Covid, that had for the majority of people a 99 percent or more survival rate. Changing the language game made it easier to impose the same lockdown regime that communist China was oppressing its people with.

The same rules do not appear in the English language, but in French and some other languages, all nouns are either masculine and feminine. The written endings of nouns, adjectives and verbs reflect the gender of the object or person who is speaking. When a noun involves both men and women, the default spelling is in the masculine in accordance with the long-taught rule: “Masculine always wins.” This has greatly upset French feminists, and for years they have campaigned for language reform, as especially for the French, language is very much part of the social construction of reality. And now we have the non-binary brigade and transgenders, rejecting the basic categories, or so they think.

Former Liberal prime mister, Tony Abbott has hammered the Labor government’s net zero agenda as impossible. Back in 2009 he was more colourful with his turn of phrase saying that the climate change alarmist position was “absolute crap,” which is a bit rough, but true. Abbott predicted that the renewable energy targets were too unrealistic to be met by 2050. He said at the launch of an Institute of Public Affairs report on Australian energy security, “The climate cult will eventually be discredited, I just hope we don’t have to endure energy catastrophe, before that happens.” Yet with the shutting down of coal-fired   power stations, and following Europe down the road of highly uncertain solar and wind energy, that could very well be Australia’s short-term fate.

Abbott is spot on about the impossibility of the Labor zero net goals which would involve “in the words of the incoming energy minister, the construction of 22,000 solar panels every day, and the erection of 14 large wind turbines every month for eight years, plus the construction of up to 10,000 kilometers of new transmission lines.”

At this stage we do not know if the Middle East conflict will develop into a full-on regional war, or even World War III. What we do know is that 31 percent of the world’s oil comes from the Middle East, and continued conflict will push up the price of oil. The World Bank has said that if the conflict is protracted “In a ‘large disruption’ scenario – comparable to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 – the global oil supply would shrink by six million to eight million barrels per day and prices could go up by 56 per cent to 75 per cent, or $140 (£115.51) to $157 (£129.53) a barrel, according to the report.

Estimates vary, and are uncertain as the future extent of the conflict is presently unpredictable, but oil could reach US $ 300 a barrel. That would be catastrophic for food production, transport, and almost very aspect of the modern economy. There is already a food price crisis across the West, including in Australia, but we have perhaps not seen anything yet.