It is hard to believe in these hard times, that there is still quasi-philosophical speculation about issues of the affluent society and happiness, as illustrated by the extract below from the Free Press. The usual line is that the abundance of consumer goods in the West had not produced happiness, which is more a spiritual thing, rather than based upon consumerism. I agree … but, so what? It is like the old come-back, that money does not buy happiness, but at least with adequate wealth, one can be miserable in style, as my dear old, poverty-stricken mother used to say, slaving away on the farm of my childhood.

No, happiness is a spiritual quality, but an adequate degree of wealth and consumption is necessary to maintain a civilised life, relative not to the caves, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but the world as we know it. The great fear now, is not from the issues that seems to concern the intellectuals writing in these blogs, but dealing with the rising costs of living, getting enough food and fuel to keep the family going. If the predictions of a rapidly coming financial crash, made by the likes of harry Dent are true (discussed today at the blog), all these debates will be just academic.

Here is the sad story spinning off from the Covid crisis, sad, because of the terrible illnesses and disabilities that are arising in the young. Thus, there is the example of high school students who are collapsing at school and having cardiac arrests. Some examples are given in the extract below. This is even more concerning than athletes collapsing, since Covid vax induced myocarditis, which is as common as 1 in every 30 vaccinated, will affect the young who are not exerting their hearts. That is an indication of just how bad things have got. But still, while the Covid vax mandates may have been put in the social fridge, the drive by Big Pharma to keep pumping out the goo into veins, goes on.

https://makismd.substack.com/p/high-school-students-collapsing-at

Elon Musk is being reported as “breaking the internet.” Now that sounds exciting, like dropping eggs, or like traditional Greek folk doing a dance and breaking plates, I think, at weddings. Beautiful, but, I digress. So, good old Elon Musk in an interview with BBC reporter James Clayton, said that the guy was outrightly lying. Clayton had said that since Elon had taken over Twitter, there was more “hateful content.” When pressed to give examples, Clayton could not. Of course, it is all a matter of definitions, because our idea of freedom, is the Left’s idea of hatred; it is their buzz word.

The site RT.com, is said by Facebook to be a Russian misinformation site, and is therefore not to be trusted, because, well, why believe the Russkies, when one can just ask Prezzy Zelensky? But, even if that is so, I think RT hit the mark with its critique of the Trump indictment in a no-holds bar exposure of Alvin Bragg, the New York City district attorney who made a name for himself by arresting Donald Trump. This is the DA who campaigned for office by pledging to prosecute Trump. So how is that for the rule of law? And the Bragg’s 2021 campaign was funded by Leftist George Soros. Overall, I suppose this is slightly “better” than being tossed out a window, if one upsets Vlad “the impailer” Putin.

https://www.rt.com/news/574580-trump-arrest-soros-justice/?fbclid=IwAR2YyKNnkf-0LWcB9RplurGBXMuhL-3S-OMNVAa86REg0FIPdMBV5Szw97s

Here is concrete proof that ChatGPT is already a threat to human liberty. Conservative lawyer and academic, Jonathan Turley, discovered that ChatGPT reported a false claim of sexual harassment that was never made against him on a trip that never occurred while he was on a faculty where he never taught, based on an article that was never written and quotes a statement that was never made by the newspaper. It was thus a complete fabrication. The threat here is that ChatGPT must have pulled the information from some false report, somewhere, or even worse, just made the story up. Either way, a person’s reputation can be destroyed almost instantly, with a great legal difficulty to respond. And, just imagine when these sorts of biased program displace more traditional search engines, which are in themselves biased and flowed, but at least give some alternatives. ChatGPT gives no alternatives, and parades as an oracle of truth.

With the drift of parts of the West to communist China, it is worthwhile looking closely at how their system works, so-called. What about religious freedom? Forget about the organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners, what about more traditional religions? Well, the CCP has revised its “Administrative Measures for Religious Activity Venues,” which holds that churches be required to demonstrate it “supports the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, supports the socialist system,” and “carries out in-depth implementation of Xi Jinping Thought” to maintain its license to operate. Shades of Chairman Mao! It is like Henry Ford saying that one could have any colour of the T model Ford, so long as it is black!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China

Nancy Van Deest thinks that the Left, are indeed the minions of Satan, literally, and I agree. That old school view may not be the flavour of the month in the present-day Christian churches, in the grip of diversity and Leftism, and of course, materialism, but that does not affect the truth of the proposition. It is hard to comprehend the radical transformations we have witnessed in recent years, with so many agendas, purely in sociological terms; there must be a deeper cause behind them. If there is God, which there is, there is also the opposite, just as if, as there is Light, there is also dark.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/leftism_and_the_minions_of_satan.html

It has been happening, relentlessly, as the traditional white British people, and British culture as replaced. Take for example that symbol of once-Britishness, Oxford’s Magdalen College. In 1458, William of Waynflete, the Bishop of Winchester, founded Magdalen College, and named it after St. Mary Magdalene, as it was intended to be a Catholic college. Fast forward to the Multicult present, and the college is no longer celebrating St. George’s Day, in honour of England’s patron saint,  but instead will be celebrating Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, of the Muslims. As one anonymous college don said: “The cancelling of St George’s Day is yet another example of the deep antipathy that the leaders of so many of Britain’s academic institutions seem to feel towards the country that built and maintains them.” This is true now about the great bulk of British institutions, which are undertaking ethno-cultural suicide. The same situation is present across the West, including Australia, where the voice referendum under the disguise of social justice, is in fact far from it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/in_oxford_england_continues_to_reshape_itself_as_a_muslim_country.html

Emmanuel Macron is yet another leader of the West, to defect from the influence of the US, and essentially go over to the dark side in supporting communist China. Hugging Chairman Xi, he said that Europe should not become a “vassal,” of the US. It should avoid being part of the conflict between the US and China over Taiwan. Apparently, he has no problem seeing Russia as the enemy, while cuddling up to China, literally, as pandas are no doubt, cute and cuddly. No thought here about what happens when communist China, after a successful invasion of Taiwan, advanced chip technology falls into their hands. I had heard that some US sources contemplating blowing up the chip factories, which after the US blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, should be a piece of cake.

 The West is quite rapidly falling apart, and the pieces are being picked up by communist China, as it forms the CCP New World Order.

While transgenderism is the Big Cultural thing at the moment, as with everything, there is a problem, arising from gender dysphoria itself. This condition means that individuals do not feel that they are in the correct body re gender. This problem is to be corrected medically and surgically, although it is somewhat odd that if everything is a social construction, it is necessary to use biological measures here rather than, well, sociology, which according to social constructionists, gives us the full answers to the nature of the universe, which is anyway, little more that a social idealist reflection in the mirror of sociology.

Still, that being said, the evidence indicates that, compared with cisgender men, there was an increased risk of overall mortality for transfeminine transgenders. And, compared with cisgender women, there was an increased risk of overall mortality for transmasculine adults. Sadly, these risks, as shown below, are represented as an increased risk for suicide and homicide, a most unfortunate state of affairs.

This case is, as far as I view it is yet one more nail in the coffin of the university system.  A fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Eric Stewart, has had six research studies retracted, the allegation being based upon falsifying data. That is not uncommon today, but what is interesting is that the research all was in woke areas, basically allegedly showing that whites are racist blah, blah. The issue being raised is that there is almost certainly much more of this stuff going on, and the extent of fraud is at present not fully disclosed.  It would not surprise me, given the replication crisis, that the great bulk of social science research fails replication, that that the whole lot is a deeply cracked castle of glass, just waiting to splitter and show shards, everywhere.

https://www.theflstandard.com/fsu-criminology-professor-abruptly-leaves-after-accusations-of-cooking-race-data/

The Biden regime is moving to put into place an Act of totalitarian nastiness, which will make the PATRIOT Act look like a freedom-loving piece of black letter law. The Act is advertised by the Democrats to deal with the CCP-influenced TikTok social media spying platform. However, the word TikTok does not even appear in the Act. What is done, is to create a means for censoring everything the regime does not want: “In review, the RESTRICT ACT (S-686) allows the government to seize the domain names, assets, computers, e-commerce, etc., of anyone who opposes the government’s position on anything. That means, for example, if you post something on social media that counters the narrative that all vaccines are safe and effective 100 percent of the time, even if you almost died from the clot shot for Covid, the US government can come arrest you, put you in prison with no trial, force-vaccinate you, and let you rot there indefinitely. Or, if you end up with thousands of dollars in cash (that you hid under your mattress) after it’s no longer valid, and you complain about it to anyone who sides with the communists in Washington DC, you can be charged with domestic terrorism for trying to steal from the IRS and your country.”

This is a whole new level of tyranny which makes the US into communist China. It may get overturned by constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court of the United States, or it may not; I would not trust the courts after they refused to give standing to the state of Texas for a review of electoral fraud in the 2020 election. If this Act gets in, expect the same to roll off the press in Australia too.

There was, once upon a time in China, a mysterious land, far, far away, in space and time, two neighbours who fell into a rather nasty dispute. One neighbour had trees that the other neighbour cut down and he took the wood. The aggrieved neighbour took revenge by taking his trusty flash light and scared the neighbour’s chickens to death. This led to a large fine, but the chicken-slayer went to the next level and killed hundred of more chickens. We do not know if there was yet another round of this business. Maybe H5N1 bird flu got to the chickens first?

In a very good piece, behind a paywall, alas, Senator Alex Antic reports on his response from the Attorney General’s Department about the question: how is Aboriginal descent established? How does one prove indigenous descent, which is highly relevant to the Voice? But the Department could not tell him, or would not, saying that the question was “not appropriate,” and true to form, a Labor minister saw the line of questioning “borderline racist”! And when asked if the Department was concerned about people falsely identifying as indigenous, the question was said to be too “hypothetical.” However, as I see it, it is not a hypothetical question, given the rapid rise in people identifying as indigenous, faster than normal demographics, so there is a case to examine, at least.

The Liberal Party’s decision to support the NO case in the coming referendum for a Voice to Federal Parliament for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders has come as a relief to a large section of the community which felt success would depend on Liberal support.

Responding to the Liberal decision follows:

Dr William Makis has a recent substack entry, discussing the skyrocketing number of strokes in young people, many of whom are athletes or play sport, and have previously had no cardiovascular risk factors such as obesity. The list of names given below are followed by a photograph which shows what would normally be radiant health. Except, all were vaxxed, some multiple times. The authorities are not pushing the line that this is a product of Covid infections, for how could they when the “life saving” vax was supposed to prevent such ill-effects, otherwise, what was the point? Unless one opts for the evil spirit, black magic explanation, the only common cause is the vax. But, as Dr Makis concludes, that explanation will never be admitted by the health authorities, as there is too much Big Pharma money involved.

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/surprise-the-covid-vaccines-were

Dr Matthew Ogilvie gives a common-sense critique of the Voice referendum, one which readers can use to advance their own criticisms to people. The problems that Aboriginal people face are local ones, not national ones as depicted in the Voice. It requires on-the-ground work to deal with gangs, drug and alcohol issues, and the level of domestic violence. To make a vast centralised bureaucracy is to engage in swallowing these problems, not pin-pointing issues of concern, and addressing them.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/another-fatal-flaw-in-the-voice/

The strategy is to make those who support the No side very guilty. Thus, an Aboriginal academic has said that unless there is a Yes vote, it would “kill a nation of people.” And the referendum “will determine the integrity” of the nation. Well, if the lack of a Voice body killed people, every such person will be dead now. And if we do find people dying it might be from the Covid vaxxes instead. As for the national integrity issue, will nations like communist China, engaged in industrial scale organ harvesting, as well as cultural genocide of the Uyghurs, be the one to cast the first stone? I am so tired of the endless guilt trip, that I would vote No, regardless.

https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-prisoners-for-transplants-forced-organ-harvesting-in-china/#:~:text=China%20is%20the%20only%20country,known%20as%20forced%20organ%20harvesting

Strange times, indeed. I never thought that I would find myself agreeing with Greg Sheridan. Back in the day I used to buy The Australian to write a critique of his material every week. But now I agree with him on cultural issues, more often than not. He is dismayed at the dangers of cancel culture, which is working its way through the Western canon, as thoroughly as any poison, but no poison is as toxic, and deadly as left-wing wokeism. Better to drink pure plutonium.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/damn-the-politically-correct-censors-of-great-art-and-literature/news-story/aae81f661768e22cc1d096ab71aeb5fb

We have talked said this about the Voice referendum, that it is a creation of the New Class elites, globalists and academics, and will not benefit the ordinary Aboriginal person, let alone the ordinary Australian.  The leader of the No campaign, Warren Mundine, who is of Aboriginal descent, and cannot be dismissed by the Yes proponents, has said that the voice is a power grab by these elites, and is cooked up to benefit them, not Indigenous Australians. And, with that wisdom, I agree.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/politics-now-peter-dutton-underestimates-how-many-lnp-voters-will-back-voice/live-coverage/d654074471e2d99bd2cd1f369a3038ff