It is good to see the Epochtimes.com, at least the bits not behind the pay wall, coming out and defending cash. They mention the Optus November 8 outage as one good reason to support a cash economy, but the lesser discussed issue is the fees associated with card transactions. Tap and go saves money for the banks, but while in the early days it was promised that there would be no fees, we now have surcharges for paying with a card, so the banks have once more double-dipped. These surcharges vary, but may be a high as a few percent on a transaction, a cost which does add up in this time of a cost-of-living crisis, and could total as much as hundreds of dollars per year.

We must resist the drive made by the globalist elite for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) and the elimination of cash. It gives too much power, once more, to those who need less power, or none at all.

Here is a story for those who have a starry-eyed view of the Australian legal system. The High Court has ruled that illegals held in indefinite detention must be released into the community, even an illegal who raped a 10-year-old boy! People like him are stateless, and cannot be deported. The High Court over-ruled Australia’s immigration laws that had been in effect since 1992, along supposed international law demands.

And, the legal fees for this will be paid for by you, the tax payer.

It is a sign of the times. According to the Vatican, transgender people can now be baptised in the Catholic Church, provided doing so does not cause “confusion,” or scandal. In my reading I did not find out exactly how “confusion” is avoided, especially if the non-binary identifying person wants to be a god parent, but does not identify as either traditional male or female, but some alternative gender. There is discretion on the part of the priest to refuse, if there is “a danger of scandal, undue legitimisation or disorientation in the educational sphere of the church community." Well, if so, expect law suits.

I came across an article on the net from a leading US law enforcement journal raising concerns about the observation of numbers of military age male Chinese entering the US as “refugees.” “So far in fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered nearly 40,000 Chinese nationals on both the southern and northern borders, far surpassing the approximately 23,500 and 27,800 encountered in fiscal years 2021 and 2022, respectively.

In July, more than 6,000 crossed the border, just two months after the COVID-19 rule that allowed for expelling illegal migrants quickly—known as Title 42—expired.”

To deal with the massive division between French and English culture in Canada, the policy of multiculturalism was adopted so that both the French and English languages would be used. But, with mass non-white, non-Western immigration, the multicultural policy was generalised. As Tasha Kheiriddin, who is non-white, notes, this diversity, pushed to the extreme, has led to the loss of national identity, and the destruction of the very things which led migrants to Canada in the first place.

The claims made by the globalist elites, such as the UN and World Economic Forum, is that 99 percent of climate scientists support the idea of a climate change emergency, caused by human industrial and agricultural activities. But this proposal of a near universal consensus has been challenged in a paper by a group of Israeli scientists, “Ninety-Nine Percent? Re-Examining the Consensus on the Anthropogenic Contribution to Climate Change,” Climate 2023, 11(11), 215. This journal, by the way, is not a fringe publication, but is one of the leading climate science papers. And the consensus claim is widely used in the political sphere to close debate on the issue of whether or not global warming is occurring. Hence the results of the critique are important for the public policy debates.

The paper goes back and examines the paper by Lynas et al., which allegedly established the 99 percent consensus figure. The critics show that the examination of the 3,000 abstracts by the Lynas et al. team is flawed, as they assume that papers that take no position on the climate change hypothesis, actually support it, which is an invalid assumption. The conclusion is: “No claim for consensus can be made from the data presented in Lynas et al.” And apart from this, just as with the Covid vax deaths and adverse effects issue, papers critical of the establishment line are difficult to place in journals, as even if critical papers were passed in peer review and published, Left wing activists would protest and intimidate the journal editors until the papers were retracted.

Jonathan Sumption is a former Justice of the Supreme Court, and a British medieval historian. He has given a defence of free speech along the lines of the classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), where free speech was a necessary condition of individual freedom. If an individual did not have the right to dissent from the mainstream, then his/her individualism would be diminished. Thus, for Mill, if only one individual held to a certain position, it still would be necessary to defend that freedom as there was no certainty that the mob was right.

The climate change fanatics have made a big song and dance about alleged rising temperatures in west Antarctica, as leading to tipping points where ice melts, raising sea levels to dangerous heights. However, the problem here is that west Antarctica is not warming but cooling.  A recent paper in the mainstream journal of the American Meteorological Society, has thrown a spanner, or is it ice cube in the works? Beginning in the early 1990s, temperatures fell by 0.93°C each decade from 1999-2018, a total of 2°C  over the 20 years. In spring temperature fell by 1.84°C every decade between 1999-2018, and in winter, the fall was 1.19°C, which is very significant indeed.

The truth about the Covid vaxxes is slowly getting out, as the sands of time slip down the hour glass, and more people than ever “die suddenly.” Thus, new analysis of the original Pfizer clinical trial data has revealed that sudden deaths were twice as high in the vaxxed group, than they were in the placebo group, those having no vax at all. The data, which has been kept strictly secured had been released as part of a Texas law suit. Researchers at the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART) looked beyond the standard view that harms would be uncovered after 28 days, and look a longer term of 60 days, which revealed the sudden death incidence. However, that is not all recently noted on the Covid vax threat front

This is happening in woke Britain, so do not be surprised to see the same thing soon in Australia. NatWest bank has been policing climate change hysteria and the associated oppression, with a “Carbon Footprint Tracker” on its mobile app. This uses transaction data of its customers and then makes suggestions on how to reduce their carbon footprint. In turn this is done by an analysis based on their shopping habits. Thus, suggestions have been made to customers to stop drinking dairy milk, not to buy new items such as clothing, share car journeys, wash clothes in cold water and turn off tumble dryers and heaters. Vegetarianism is actively promoted.

So far, all of this is advisory, but we can see where this will go with Central Bank Digital Currencies, where customers who act contrary to the carbon mania will simply be debanked. 

Ramesh Thakur, an emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, has given an interesting speech arguing that woke, or what was once called political correctness, was the philosophy, or anti-philosophy, enabling the tyranny seen with the Covid plandemic, and the surprising public acceptance of the erosion of liberty and core biomedical principles, such as informed consent.

The core argument is that the ideology of woke, the solidification of radical Leftist deconstructions of Western civilisation, had already attacked and undermined existing knowledge such as the distinction between males and females. If this fundamental truth can be challenged and effectively overturned, then so could existing science and public policies. Along with this agenda is the cult of the expert, technocrats who know best and advise on how to deal with what hey define as a deadly pandemic, contrary to facts. As well, there is the corporate power of Big Pharma, financing the media, and shuffling funds to politician’s’ re-election campaigns.

According to the government, the Optus meltdown that led to much of the large cities grinding to a halt, was not due to hacking, but to a fault in the provider’s core network. That is vague, leading the fault undisclosed and the cause of the fault undiagnosed. Some experts say it may have been due to a software upgrade failure, Everyone is stirring away from the cyber-attack idea which it think is plausible. I note that in the extract from The Australian, below, which I will discuss, it is said: “Australia has been hit by a string of attacks, with Optus and Medibank in the firing line. Russian hackers accessed the health records and other personal information from almost 10 million Medibank customers.” That seems to imply the possibility of a cyber-attack, since a software upgrade is not an attack. And if the authorities could get away with not scaring us, wouldn’t they?

Along with this I note that the government is instigating a no-fault reporting system, where companies will be required to report cyber ransom demands. There has been a 45 percent increase in ransomware attacks in 2023, so this is an indication of he sheer extent of the problem:

I have no evidence beyond a detective-like suspicion, but I would not be surprised to learn that the meltdown of Optus last week was in the end linked to a cyber-attack, which would include internal sabotage. Mere problems arising from software and other blah blahs, does not to my mind explain the extent of the problem, but, I am not an expert, at anything at all, really. However, Optus did have a cyber-attack in 2022, and it has just legally failed to keep secret a report on that. It would be interesting to see, if the report gets in the public domain, any clues that may be in it. The system is nervous about admitting to cyber-attacks as it scares people, as these attacks show that the IT system has feet of clay and is extremely vulnerable if the right nasties target it.

For example, the entire population of the US state of Maine has had their data stolen by on-line thieves. This arose as a ransomware attack that the authorities discovered on May 31 this year. It has impacted upon 1.3 million individuals. And, if it can happen there, it can happen here too.

Dr Peter McCullough has given a concise summary of recent scientific papers documenting what he describes as a cardiovascular disaster regarding people having the Covid vaxxes. While there is still a strong culture of academic suppression regarding the deaths from the vaxxes, there are at least 284 clearly documents deaths from the Covid mRNA vaccines, which Covid vax critics regard as a drop the ocean. But, the criterion for a vaccine recall was less than 50 deaths in the past, a standard that has been ignored with the Covid vaxxes.

Nation First has given a tremendous coverage to the elephant in the room issue that our parliament does not want to address, as to why young Australians are dying at a rate far beyond the norm. The main cause of these “sudden deaths” is cardiac arrest. A study is quoted from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne showed that out of 1,319 cases of people under 50 dying between mid-2019 and mid-2021, a quarter died from sudden cardiac arrest. That is something that was not observed prior to the Covid vax rollout. Cardiac arrest is now the leading cause of death of people under 50 in Australia. The health “experts” are denying a Covid vax link here, but there is indeed growing scientific evidence, not discussed in Australia, to implicate the vaxxes. This is reviewed in another article at the blog today.

https://nationfirst.substack.com/p/more-young-aussies-are-dying-why

The media coverage last week of the Optus meltdown that left cities almost grinding to a halt, did not focus on the real problem here, not the odd bod not being able to get his coffee. The only real saviours were other networks still working, and cash. Malcolm Roberts has given a superb speech on this issue as illustrating the threat that removing cash and establishing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will bring.

The government’s Identification Verification Services Bill itself will make it irresistible for hackers due to the centralisation of data. As Roberts rightly notes: “If the government centralises the private data it collects from citizens, on-sells the records to the commercial market while simultaneously mandating the use of digitised personal records within the economy, it will be installing digital socialism. A digital prison no less. Government and its parasitic billionaire mates want to become the middlemen of all transactions between customers and businesses.”

A preprint scientific study, geared for mainstream publication, reports that the research team examining the mRNA Covid vax has found foreign DNA, genetic material, in the vax; “loads of SV40 enhancer-promoter, ori, and virus spike in Pfizer are up to 186 billion copies per dose," one of the team, said. Cutting the technicalities, some of which are extracted below, the DNA is a contaminant and should not be present. It seems that it may have got into the vaccine by the use of bacteria to produce the mRNA spike protein. While using bacteria in pharmaceutical production is common, foreign DNA is supposed to get removed.

The concern is that the foreign DNA could get mistaken by the body as human DNA and get integrated into the cells, effectively meaning that spike proteins will be produced forever. As well, there are concerns of increased cancer risk. All this is the longer-term impact of the Covid vaxxes, which clearly shows that the Covid issue is not over, by a long shot.

Here is yet another mainstream media report, which confirms the critique that we have been developing at the blog, of the surge in mass immigration impacting negatively upon both inflation and the rental and housing crisis. The impact of overseas buyers of lower-level housing creates a massive crisis for local Australians trying to get rent, or buy a first home, which now is a distant dream, leading to further accelerating declines in the white population. Thus, we may speak of mass immigration policy, which negatively impacts upon young Australians, as a genocidal policy.

However, taking a step back, it seems as well that the local elites are facing a few problems too in the luxury property market, as masses of rich Chinese buyers come to scoop up multimillion-dollar luxury properties across Australia. This is not a great problem compared to the impact that hundreds of thousands of overseas students are having, fuelled by the greed of our evil universities. In a way it is an irony, as while the local rich elites are not threatened with homelessness or to join the growing numbers in tent cities, at least they are paying more for their luxuries. And these elites are part of Big Australia, which is behind the present Great White Replacement immigration policy.

At the blog, James Reed has done a great job, if I may say so, of documenting through reputable sources, the terrible impact that the Labor government’s mass migration, great White replacement policy, is having upon Australia’s rental and housing crisis. To support this, here is an extract from a summary of an article from the Fin Review, which says that Australia has the biggest decline in income in the developed world, because of surging mass immigration and rising mortgage rates. After-tax income for every Australian household has fallen by 5.1 per cent.

 According to ABC finance expert, Alan Kohler, record immigration is fuelling inflation and leading to Australia having higher interest rates. And AMP chief economist Shane Oliver said the present mass immigration, the largest in recent history, was financially hurting Australians:

The “Green paradox,” arises from the present drive in the West for zero net carbon emissions, as policies for carbon reduction in the future accelerate the very carbon-producing activates the Green elites would want to control, as firms hurry to extract as much carbon-producing resources as they can now before the Green reduction guillotine falls on their businesses.

Thus, according to a report by the fanatical climate change alarmist United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and other research institutes, the fossil fuel production planned by countries for 2030 is set to more than double (110 per cent more), the level required by the UN to limit supposed global warming to 1.5^o C. This makes the Paris Climate Accords redundant, as more coal will be produced and used until at least 2030, especially by communist China, who only gives lip service to Western climate change nonsense, while building new coal-fired power stations at a record rate. UNEP Director Inger Andersen said “Governments' plans to expand fossil fuel production are undermining the energy transition needed to achieve net zero emissions, creating economic risks and placing the future of humanity in question.”