The Morrison government has delayed the Senate report on the cash ban until 28 February, for a longer period to consider the evidence. Perhaps all of the calls being made by people concerned about losing one of our greatest freedoms; to buy things when we want, privately, may be getting through. So keep it up! This needs to be fought tooth and nail because without cash, people will be at the mercy of banks who can “debank” them anytime they want, meaning that they will be locked out of the economy. I imagine that this will be done to political activists from the Right, to gun shops and any one the systems does not like, to crush them financially.
Call your Senators to demand they vote against this rank corruption and assault on our civil liberties!

     I have been waiting for this one, and it was only a matter of time; the Pope has gone full commo, calling for global wealth redistribution:
  https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/02/06/tax-the-rich-pope-francis-calls-for-global-wealth-redistribution/

“Tax cuts for the wealthy constitute a “structure of sin,” Pope Francis said Wednesday in a passionate address calling for international wealth redistribution. “Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to fund health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts,” the pontiff told participants in a Vatican seminar, “thus impeding the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents.”
“Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development,” Francis told the meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences.
During his discourse, the pope repeated his conviction that poverty is on the rise worldwide and “the poor increase around us.” With the passage of time and the advances of civilization the number of poor people increases rather than diminishing, Francis similarly asserted last June, and “the poor are always poorer, and today they are poorer than ever.” As a Brookings Institution report noted in late 2018, however, the world is currently experiencing “the lowest prevalence of extreme poverty ever recorded in human history — less than 8 percent,” and that number falls with each passing year. According to the widely used “international poverty line,” people are considered to be in “extreme poverty” if they live on less than $1.90 per day or its equivalent.

     I have always thought that a new ice age would be coming, not based upon any science, since I know nothing about science, but because the very idea was “cool.” Oh, a pun, pardon me, we are too old for that. Anyway, apart from my ignorance, I could be right:
  https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1237178/weather-warning-ice-age-earth-sun-hibernates-solar-minimum-long-range-forecast

“Earth could be braced for a ‘mini ICE-AGE' as experts warn a solar minimum could last until the 2050s. Sunspot activity on the surface of the Sun follows a well-known but little understood 11 year cycle. Activity rises and falls creating the so-called solar maximum and then solar minimum. During a solar maximum, the Sun is more powerful and is littered with sunspots. Conversely when the Sun enters a solar minimum – which it did about two years ago - energy from our host star begins to lessen. However, one expert has warned that the Sun will enter a period of “hibernation” this year, in what as known as a Grand Solar Minimum (GSM). Prof Valentina Zharkova, from the department of mathematics, physics and electrical engineering at Northumbria University, warned this could cause global temperatures to drop by one degrees Celsius. While that sounds like an insignificant drop, it could have major ramifications for the planet, including a slowdown in agricultural production.”

     Apparently, the coronavirus can be transmitted through human faeces, and the media is having fun, like kids playing in mud for the first time, saying the word “faeces,” over, and over, and over again, with Freudian delight:
  https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/02/asia-pacific/science-health-asia-pacific/coronavirus-feces-risk-of-spread/#.XjzjbGgzaUk

“While doctors have focused on respiratory samples from pneumonia cases to identify coronavirus patients, they might have ignored a less apparent source of the spread: diarrhea. The novel coronavirus was detected in the loose stool of the first U.S. case — a finding that hasn’t featured among case reports from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak. However, that doesn’t surprise scientists who have studied coronaviruses, nor doctors familiar with the bug that caused SARS. Diarrhea occurred in about 10 to 20 percent of patients afflicted with severe acute respiratory syndrome about 17 years ago and was the source of an explosive SARS outbreak in the Amoy Gardens residential complex in Hong Kong. SARS and Wuhan viruses bind to the same distinctly shaped protein receptors in the body that are expressed in the lungs and intestines, making these organs the primary targets for both viruses, said Fang Li, an associate professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences at the University of Minnesota. The discovery of the Wuhan virus, dubbed 2019-nCoV, in the fecal material of the 35-year-old man treated at the Providence Regional Medical Center Everett in Washington is “interesting,” said Scott Lindquist, the state epidemiologist for infectious disease at Washington’s Department of Health. “That adds to the knowledge about this,” he told reporters on a conference call Friday. “It’s not only excreted in your respiratory secretions, it’s also secreted in your stool.”