Our Defence Minister, Richard Marles, recently announced Australia’s new defence plan, which - with luck - could enable us to defend ourselves in about 10-15 years’ time. Unfortunately, that may well be far too late!

From lasers to artificial intelligence, the Australian Defence Force has unveiled its six priority technologies for times of rapidly evolving warfare.

The 2026 Defence Innovation Science and Technology Strategy was formally unveiled on August 4, setting out a road map for turning research into battlefield capability.

Long-range hypersonic weapons, high-energy lasers, autonomous systems, quantum technologies, artificial intelligence and undersea warfare rounded out the Australian Defence Force’s priority wish list to industry and researchers.

The strategy would allow Australia to stay afloat in an age of rapid technological change and asymmetric warfare, Defence Minister Richard Marles said.

“Technology is reshaping warfare at a pace we have never seen before,” he said.

“The lessons from conflicts around the world are clear: nations that can innovate faster and adopt new technologies more effectively will have a decision advantage.”

The strategy seeks to leverage hard-won lessons from ongoing global conflicts and capabilities of Australia’s regional neighbours.

Defence chief Admiral Mark Hammond pointed to the war in Ukraine as a case study, noting a swarm of 117 drones that only cost about $1,000 each had inflicted about $7 billion in damage on Russia’s strategic bombing fleet.

The June 2025 attack, dubbed Operation Spiderweb, was hailed as a strategic coup and demonstration of the ability of autonomous weapons to inflict outsized damage.

Uncrewed surface and underwater vessels had similarly reshaped naval warfare in the Black Sea, Admiral Hammond said.

“Development of technologies that either leverage these capabilities or counter those capabilities is a much-needed value add for the Australian Defence Force,” he said.

Australia is facing a rapidly changing defence environment in which its regional isolation is no longer a major asset.

“Australia’s traditional geographic advantages are eroding as regional military capabilities increase in range, speed, and sophistication,” the latest report reads.

The priorities outlined in the strategy document released on August 4, like its 2024 predecessor, were informed by the National Defence Strategy.

Chief Defence Scientist Tanya Munro said the strategy was less about identifying new priorities than finding ways to ensure the ADF derives benefits from them.

“Today’s strategy marks an evolution, not a revolution,” she said.

“What has changed is the environment.”

Richard Marles (pictured below) said the strategy would build on Australia’s efforts to build its sovereign capabilities and bolster regional security.

It all sounds so good!

In addition, Marles announced Australia would increase its military spend by $53 billion over a decade towards a goal of 3% of GDP by 2035 under the “NATO calculation method”.

But that raises an important issue.

NATO’s method for calculating defence spending as a percentage of GDP faces widespread criticism for using an expansive definition that counts non-combat costs such as military pensions, veteran compensation, and base housing.

So, all this does is make it look like we are spending more on military readiness and frontline deterrence – when in fact we are not.

In short, our new defence review report will not lead to any actual short-term or even medium-term initiatives that will improve our defence capabilities – it’s all spin!

We will therefore remain a sitting duck should Communist China choose to include us in any attack on Taiwan and other nations in the region such as Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea.

The only country that could effectively defend us is the USA – but will they?

Anyone who has studied warfare and especially the build up to WW2 will know that China is on the cusp of starting an offensive against Taiwan.

The Taiwanese certainly know that and are going to extraordinary lengths to prepare their country for a full-scale Chinese invasion.

Ongoing war games test multi-layered coastal defences, civilian urban resilience, and critical infrastructure protection against cyber and military disruptions.

Japan, the Philippines and South Korea are doing much the same.

But the Albanese government and our Defence bureaucrats think we can all just sit back and enjoy life as though there is nothing in the world to worry about!

The reality is we should be extending out liquid fuel supplies to at least 6 months in order to cover the likely closure of supplies from the north, as well as digging for more gas and coal, and urgently working towards refining most of our own fuel – like we used to.

We should also be urgently building up our defence capabilities with drones of all types, missiles, and other proven self-defence materiel that is being so effectively used by the Ukraine military.

The next war we may well be involved in won’t be overseas - it will be on our own shores.

Satellite images and public military disclosures show that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is expanding its infrastructure, testing amphibious assault equipment, and building full-scale mock-ups of foreign government and military targets – including in Australia - to practice potential conflict scenarios.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has told his military to be ready to move against Taiwan NEXT YEAR. He may or may not go ahead with that, but we should certainly be taking appropriate urgent steps in case he does.

That’s what our government should be doing.

But they would much rather spend massive amounts of money on totally unnecessary climate change initiatives that won’t make a skerrick of difference to the perfectly normal period of global warming that our planet is currently experiencing.

It’s time we all woke up to reality before it’s too late.

Appeasement doesn’t work – we need to show strength and resolve!

Thanks to Nick Wilson writing in The Epoch Times (with reference to AAP) together with News.com.au, Instagram and You Tube for the images and Johannes Leak for his cartoon.

While Americans died alone in hospitals during the COVID pandemic, buried loved ones without funerals, lost family businesses, depleted life savings, postponed weddings, and watched their children disappear into bedrooms and computer screens Dr. Anthony Fauci was keeping a diary about the person who apparently fascinated him most: himself, Dr. Anthony Fauci. His newly released journals do not read like the reflections of a public servant burdened by national suffering. They read like a personal press archive filled with television appearances, celebrity encounters, flattering profiles, fan merchandise, compliments, invitations, and breathless observations about his expanding fame.

On May 21, 2020 with approximately 94,000 Americans already dead, Fauci recorded a flattering front page profile in The Washington Post. He wrote, “The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable.” He then declared, “It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country.” The misspelling of hyperbole may have been accidental, but the hyperbole was not. The country was grieving and economically immobilized while Fauci privately marveled at the immensity of his own renown.

His fascination with celebrity appeared repeatedly. On March 31, 2020 he wrote, “Complete craziness with this Fauci cult hero stuff.” before preserving an article about Fauci socks, Fauci doughnuts, and Fauci fan art. The next day, he catalogued more tributes: “Continued crazy stuff: Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; video games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead” along with restaurant dishes bearing his name. A man genuinely indifferent to fame does not carefully preserve every bobblehead, flattering headline, fan tribute, and novelty item that crosses his desk.

As restaurant owners contemplated bankruptcy, employees lost their jobs, and patients entered hospitals knowing their families might never see them again, Fauci recorded, “Brad Pitt plays me on Saturday Night Live and thanks me in serious tone after his skit.” He also preserved a “Hilarious video of Billy Crystal playing me in a Trump dungeon prison,” copied a message from Barbra Streisand, and documented attention from other entertainers. Every famous name became another jewel in the crown he was quietly constructing for himself.

His account of an online appearance with Julia Roberts is especially revealing. Fauci wrote that she was “absolutely fabulous” and described how she covered her mouth and exclaimed, “Oh my God. It’s Dr. Fauci, he is here.” Roberts called him her personal hero, prompting Fauci to conclude, “Great experience!!” complete with the preadolescent flourish of double exclamation points. While American children were losing classrooms, birthday parties, graduations, sports, sleepovers, and ordinary time with friends Fauci was thrilled that a Hollywood actress was thrilled to meet him.

In another entry he wrote, “OMG! This is really getting nutsy”, before discussing a report that author Sally Quinn had modeled an erotic male character on him. He returned to the subject days later: “Truly unbelievable. People naming their dogs after me. Sally Quinn saying that I was the erotic lead male in a book.” The story had nothing to do with infection control, hospital capacity, treatments, vaccines, or protecting vulnerable Americans. It mattered because it was about Fauci.

By June 25, 2020, the country had endured months of economic destruction, isolation, and school closures. Fauci nevertheless recorded, “I have been invited to appear on Dancing with the Stars, no thanks!” Even his refusal required documentation. The following day, according to his own entry, approximately 125,000 Americans had died. Families were mourning and businesses were collapsing while Fauci preserved an invitation to a televised dance competition as another testament to his cultural importance.

Fauci monitored his press coverage with equal devotion. On March 22, 2020 he wrote: “Press is going wild with me. Front page in Washington Post yesterday and Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic.” On April 7, 2020 he noted: “Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.” He later observed that Trump “seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him.” During a once-in-a-century emergency, Fauci was privately keeping score.

He even tracked the merchandise produced in his image. “The ‘swag’ around me is getting really ridiculous,” he wrote. “Geeeez!! I do not like this one bit.” The protest is difficult to take seriously from a man who meticulously catalogued every item bearing his face. His diaries also record television bookings, cartoons, personal praise, and private communications with prominent journalists. He complained when appearances were blocked, tracked which interviews had been approved, and documented allies who promised to restore his access to the airwaves. Media exposure had become a continuing personal concern.

The corporate media enthusiastically helped create Saint Anthony of Washington, D.C. Reporters who should have scrutinized Fauci treated him as an oracle instead installed his halo. His contradictions were excused as evolution, his pronouncements repeated as commandments, and his critics dismissed as dangerous. Networks kept the country in a sustained state of panic while providing Fauci with the attention he privately recorded with such diligence.

The consequences were borne by ordinary Americans. Families were excluded from hospital rooms and denied final conversations with dying relatives. Funerals, weddings, church services, graduations, and family gatherings disappeared. Children lost classrooms, friendships, activities, and milestones. Millions lost jobs, savings, businesses, and financial security. Fauci, meanwhile, retained his salary, pension, prestige, and access to the country’s most powerful people. His restrictions were borne by others while the profiles, awards, and celebrity invitations accrued to him.

The diary also reveals the closeness between Fauci and media personalities who were supposedly covering him independently. When a journalist suggested he had been humiliated after a television interview was canceled, Fauci privately responded, “F you, Peter,” using the full obscenity. After a congressional exchange, he recorded a message from CNN anchor Dana Bash telling him he was “a better man” along with a remark attributed to Wolf Blitzer that nobody would have blamed Fauci for directing another obscenity at a congressman. The same media establishment that elevated him was privately consoling, praising, and protecting him.

Science requires skepticism, but Fauci demanded deference. His declaration that attacks upon him were attacks upon science revealed the narcissism behind the performance. No individual is science, no bureaucrat is infallible, and no number of flattering profiles can transform personal authority into scientific truth.

His entries also sharpen questions concerning the origin of COVID. In January 2020 Fauci wrote, “We know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier”, while maintaining that the virus had jumped from animals to humans elsewhere. Days later, he recorded discussions in which leading scientists considered whether the virus might not have developed naturally. Whatever conclusion one reaches, the diary demonstrates that serious uncertainty existed privately while Americans were publicly told that laboratory origin theories were disreputable fantasies.

By May 2021, Fauci complained that coverage concerning his alleged “flip flopping” on the origin theory had become “out of control”. Once again, his concern centered on press coverage and its effect upon him. A transparent official would have focused on disclosing what the government knew, when it knew it, and why competing theories had been marginalized. Fauci’s instinct was to manage the narrative surrounding Anthony Fauci. That instinct permeates the diaries. Criticism becomes a public relations problem. Restricted television access becomes a grievance. Praise becomes an event worth recording. Celebrity encounters become milestones. Fauci masks, portraits, murals, songs, socks, doughnuts, bobbleheads, and restaurant dishes become artifacts of a burgeoning legend. America endured a pandemic. Anthony Fauci appears to have experienced a coronation.

The famous names continued for years. Julia Roberts sent flowers. Anna Wintour hosted a lengthy video event. Sean Penn, Matt Damon, Steph Curry, Trevor Noah, Lil Wayne, and others entered Fauci’s celebrity orbit. At the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors, Fauci recorded embracing Hunter Biden and their mutual amusement that a photograph would cause the internet to “explode”. Even near the end of the record, Fauci remained absorbed by famous acquaintances and the attention surrounding him. The most damning feature of these diaries is not any single sentence but the cumulative portrait they create. Fauci emerges as a man extraordinarily alert to his fame, intensely interested in his media coverage, delighted by celebrity admiration, and determined to preserve every validation. While Americans surrendered funerals, weddings, worship, education, work, companionship, and financial security, Fauci documented the applause.

Families stood outside hospitals while he recorded flattering profiles. Children sat alone on birthdays while he preserved stories about bobbleheads and fan art. Brides postponed weddings while he noted the invitation from Dancing with the Stars. Businesses collapsed while he marveled that he was the most famous person in America. The public was ordered to surrender normal life while Fauci became increasingly intoxicated by his abnormal prominence. Anthony Fauci wants history to remember the interviews, magazine covers, celebrity friendships, honorary degrees, and institutional tributes. His diary makes that abundantly clear. History should instead remember a federal bureaucrat who enjoyed extraordinary authority, evaded meaningful accountability, and meticulously chronicled his own elevation while the country suffered beneath policies he helped legitimize.

The American people do not owe Fauci another award, glowing documentary, or reverential profile. They are owed the truth about what officials knew, the mistakes they made, the dissent they suppressed, and the damage their policies inflicted. They are also owed a public health system led by people who understand that service is not celebrity, authority is not infallibility, and a nation’s suffering is not the backdrop for one bureaucrat’s diary of self adoration.

For two years, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Americans that to doubt him was to doubt science itself. On Wednesday, under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, America’s most powerful public health official delivered a different message. He said nothing...111 times.

Question after question, he gave the same rehearsed line: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment.” Not about the pandemic he managed. Not about the virus’s origins. Not about the response that shut down the country. In more than 200 prior appearances before Congress, he had never once taken the Fifth. Wednesday, he took it until the committee lost count.

Then Sen. Josh Hawley, former Missouri attorney general, dropped the pretense that any of this was about the Constitution. He asked what day of the week it was. The Fifth. What color tie Fauci was wearing. The Fifth. What color the carpet was beneath his feet. The Fifth. The man who assured 330 million Americans he could read a virus’s molecular future couldn’t, under oath, name the color of the floor.

“You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you’ve been pardoned, as you very well know,” Hawley pressed, citing Supreme Court precedent that a pardoned witness may not “stand upon his privilege.” Then the knife: “You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime. And I hope you’ll go home and write that in your diary.”

Look at the record.

Start with the pardon. In his final hours in office, Joe Biden handed Fauci a “full and unconditional” pre-emptive pardon for federal conduct from 2014 through January 20, 2025. It was extraordinary clemency for a man never charged with anything. Fauci insisted he had “committed no crime.” Fair question: If he did nothing wrong, why the most sweeping personal pardon in modern memory, and then the Fifth on top of it?

Because the pardon has limits. It buries the past. It does nothing for the future. Say something false Wednesday, and it becomes a new statement, a new potential crime, beyond the pardon’s reach. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. put it plainly: If Fauci “lies again, he could be subject to perjury prosecution.” Silence was the last shield he had. He hid behind it.

What is he so determined not to say? For years, Rand Paul has charged that Fauci misled Congress about U.S. funding of “gain of function” research at the Wuhan lab and helped bury early suspicion that the virus escaped it. Fauci denies it, resting on a technical definition critics call a semantic shell game. Yet the National Institutes of Health conceded in 2021 that an experiment it funded left lab mice sicker, and in late 2024, the Republican-led House Coronavirus Subcommittee found a lab leak the likeliest source of a virus that killed more than a million Americans.

Fauci’s own diaries, released this week, cut deeper. In January 2020, Paul says, Fauci privately doubted the Wuhan wet market story, well before “lab leak” entered the public vocabulary, even as the country was steered toward a natural origin. Days later came the notorious “Proximal Origin” paper waving the theory away.

None of it touches what Americans lived: masks on, then off; schools chained shut; childhoods and years no one gets back. Some lost more than years. In the season Fauci led, hundreds of thousands died the way that season decreed: alone. Sedated behind sealed doors, a breathing tube where their voice used to be, visitors turned away at the threshold, their last moments held up on a nurse’s phone. No hand to hold. No final word. A ventilator does not permit one. Sons and daughters said goodbye to a muted screen and a chest that rose and fell until it didn’t.

They never got to “respectfully decline to answer.” They had no counsel to advise them into silence. They were silenced anyway. Fauci was in the room to speak and chose not to. The dead cannot plead the Fifth. They already surrendered everything the Constitution had to give.

So what now? Paul denied the privilege, ordered Fauci to answer, and warned that obstructing Congress “is against the law.” He set an August 5 committee vote on holding Fauci in contempt. He and Hawley argue that a pardoned man forfeits the Fifth, a theory Paul concedes has “probably never been tested.” The courts will now decide.

A pardon is not a gag order on history, and the Fifth Amendment is not a hall pass from the people whose lives were upended. Fauci may invoke his rights, but Americans may draw their own conclusions about a man who spent a career demanding their trust and, given one chance to speak plainly under oath, could not bring himself to name the color of the carpet.

The science, it turns out, speaks for itself — right up until it’s subpoenaed.

As the Albanese government stumbles from one crisis to another trying to satisfy its obsessive drive to achieve net zero with just renewables and battery storage, many other nations are showing us how to develop cheap and reliable energy abundance.

Not long ago, Japan stood before the world pledging to become a paragon of decarbonization. Its newspapers were filled with talk of hydrogen corridors, offshore wind farms, EV subsidies and other supposed remedies to ‘save the planet’.

To satisfy international climate lobbyists, Japan planned for years to phase out coal.

Political leaders spoke of a “moral duty” to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2050.

But as geopolitical reality intruded, this stance dissipated.

Japan is among the world’s top five oil importers, importing more than 94% of its crude oil from the Middle East. When transit through the Strait of Hormuz was interrupted, the impact was immediate.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi (pictured above) quickly ordered the release of 80 million barrels from oil stockpiles, equivalent to about 45 days of domestic demand.

A fuel once portrayed as the ‘enemy’ in net zero rhetoric became critically important to prevent economic catastrophe.

Japan is also now preparing to formalize a new ‘energy‑first’ posture in a revised strategy.

Greater weight will be given to the security of fossil fuel supplies. Their Prime Minister anticipates avoiding altogether shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

As part of that strategy - and for the first time - crude oil from the USA has arrived directly in Japan.

There’s a reason why Japan is investing in procuring crude oil – it is built into everything, as indicated in the image below.

Oil is critical to all aspects of modern manufacturing.

Japan’s vast petrochemical industry converts crude oil into synthetic fibres, fertilizers, resins, paints, and electronic components.

Every smartphone, car dashboard, and solar panel relies on petrochemicals. Without them, Japan’s export engine would grind to a halt.

Substances much demonized by net zero enthusiasts are used to make semiconductors, ship coatings, and electric-vehicle batteries.

Japan, like its neighbour South Korea, is reopening coal-fired power plants once condemned as relics of a dirtier era. Energy officials cited “extraordinary supply uncertainty” as justification for using the same fuel they had promised to eliminate.

Representatives from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) stated that increasing coal operations serves as an immediate solution.

Prime Minister Takaichi said expanded coal usage, combined with restarted nuclear plants, would offset about 40% of the LNG imports Japan previously received through the Strait of Hormuz.

By simply letting older coal plants operate without political handicaps, METI projects a massive savings of 500,000 tons of LNG over the fiscal year.

Japan’s thousands of factories, chemical plants, and data centres cannot pause for the cloudy or windless days that make solar and wind energy so unreliable, and dependency on imports leaves no margin for experimentation.

Taken together, the decisions supporting use of oil, gas, and coal exhibit an unwavering commitment to proven, reliable energy sources.

Japan is refusing to sacrifice security for climate diplomacy.

The Japanese people have a legacy of resilience, engineering brilliance, and industrial mastery. Today, the country stands firm against climate dogma to secure its industrial future with the hydrocarbons that built its greatness in the first place.

Meanwhile, when Rwandan President Paul Kagame (pictured in lead image) stood up at the Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris earlier this year, he didn’t talk like a leader hedging his bets on energy policy. He talked like a determined man in a hurry.

Kagame told the assembled audience that nuclear generated electricity technology “is evolving in ways that benefit countries with small grids, allowing Africa to be among the early adopters,” and that small modular reactors (SMRs) in particular are “especially suited to Africa’s requirements.”

This is a remarkable change in direction.

For decades, nuclear electricity was treated as the exclusive domain of wealthy, industrialized nations with deep pockets, massive grids, and decades of institutional experience.

Kagame’s message flips that script.

Small modular reactors are, in many ways, a good fit for the world that’s actually emerging in reality - one defined by distributed populations, smaller grids, off-grid industrial sites, and an insatiable new appetite for electricity driven by data centres and AI infrastructure.

That sounds very much like Australia.

Japan and Rwanda are just two countries out of many that are now increasing their use of fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

They are still committed to renewables such as solar and wind but on a much smaller scale than originally planned.

The reason is they have woken up to reality.

This was largely brought about by the war in the Middle East and the realisation that all countries – including Australia – depend on coal, gas, oil and, increasingly, nuclear energy, in order to cope with the huge new demands for cheap and reliable energy for data centres and AI.

Meanwhile, the Albanese government - spurred on by the likes of Chris Bowen and Matt Kean – continue to ignore all the evidence as they proceed with their insane crusade to achieve net zero despite the huge and growing cost to taxpayers.

Australia is the only G20 member with a legal ban on nuclear energy generation.

And all of this is despite the fact that nothing we do as a nation will do anything to reduce global emissions as our share is only a miniscule 1%.

Thanks to Vijay Jayaraj at the CO2 Coalition (https://co2coalition.org) for much of the information relating to Japan and Ronald Stein, Olivia Vaughan and Steve Curtis also at CO2 Coalition for the information relating to Rwanda. Thanks also to Facebook and Johannes Leak for his cartoon.

Yesterday, Australians appreciated the Prophet Isaiah’s warning that being ruled by women is a punishment for sin.

From The Noticer:

A massive Telstra outage that impacted millions of Australians has been blamed on an “unreliable network” caused by the offshoring of hundreds of jobs to India.

The nationwide outage, which started in the early hours of Wednesday, led to hundreds of Triple-Zero calls failing, and disrupted mobile calls, data services, some EFTPOS systems, and public transport networks until services were restored at 4pm.

The outage occurred as chief executive Vicki Brady, who is paid $6.7 million a year to run the telecommunications giant, was on an overseas holiday…

Ms Brady, who regularly posts about diversity, equity and inclusion on social media, is anti-Australia Day, and lives in a $7.6 million mansion on Sydney’s north shore, has moved forward her return to Australia to Friday.

In university, I read serious political science texts telling us that ceding leadership of our nations to women would bring world peace.

Anyway:

Internal Telstra sources told The Sydney Morning Herald the outage was caused by a software bug triggered by a botched firmware upgrade, but Communication Workers Union national secretary Shane Murphy said the “utterly shameful” outage was a direct result of recent job cuts.

More than 400 jobs were moved to Indian technology Infosys in February, and Ms Brady told staff by email at the time they could reapply with the India-based company or take a redundancy….

The outage comes after Indian IT engineers were blamed for a 13-hour Triple-Zero outage on rival network Optus that left at least three people dead across Australia in September.

Incompetence at crucial infrastructure and leadership nodes due to discrimination against straight White men is a legitimate explanation for yesterday’s outage, however another explanation must be considered.

On Monday, Australia announced it had signed a defence treaty with Fiji. Hours later, China fired a nuclear capable missile over Phillipines airspace, which splashed down in waters off Nauru.

It was a message.

In recent years, the Chinese navy has circumnavigated Australia and conducted live fire exercises with little to no warning in the Tasman Sea. It has been attempting to sign defence treaties of its own with South Pacific nations, and as it owns the Port of Frickin’ Darwin, the Australian government is considering building a brand new port in the top end.

The post-Covid world has ushered in a new era of Great Power rivalry and proxy war, and China is making it clear they see the South Pacific as within their sphere of influence.

By extension this means Australia. Millions of Chinese colonists already reside in Australia, providing China with a pretext to intervene in Australia’s domestic affairs any time it wants in order to defend its people.

Moreover, we live in the era of Fifth Generation Warfare, or unrestricted warfare, whereby states weaponise industrial “accidents”, media and social media manipulation, election tampering, mass immigration and psychological conditioning to achieve war aims.

Thus there is every possibility that the firing of a missile into the Pacific and a takedown of Australia’s primary communications network was a one-two punch by the Chinese government. I am not the only one who suspects a link.

If the timing of yesterday’s Telstra outage was a coincidence, it was one hell of a coincidence.

In Marxist theory, socialism is considered the transitional phase between capitalism and communism.

And that’s why we need to be aware of what is happening in Australia as well as in many other western nations – especially the UK – where governments are steadily shifting further to the left.

Once again, we’ve just witnessed the Albanese government join forces with Larissa Waters’ socialist Greens party to push through CGT legislation that is clearly detrimental to our nation - and especially to our younger people.

It’s a classic case of hard-left socialists imposing taxation and social constraints on people who are prepared to work hard and achieve success. And they have the cheek to call it ‘reform’.

This shouldn’t surprise us because history shows that is how socialism works – it forces division within society between those who desire personal freedom in their everyday lives and those who want to control every facet of our lives.

Turning people against each other by sowing division and hatred is the primary means by which hard-left political parties such as the Greens corrupt society, overturn its morality, and usurp political power to gain power.

In 1926, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong wrote in his article “Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society”: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.”

The Communist Party arbitrarily creates concepts of class where none previously existed and then incites these arbitrarily divided groups to struggle against each other.

This is the strategy the communists use in their rise to power.

To promote its cause, the Communist Party selects and exaggerates certain issues that stem from the decline in moral values.

Then it claims that the root cause of these issues is not moral weakness, but rather the structure of society. It singles out particular classes as the “oppressors” and promotes popular struggle against these classes as being the solution to society’s ills.

The Communist Party promises that by overthrowing the so-called oppressors, an egalitarian utopia can be created. However, that’s never happened in human history.

In China, Mao’s innovation was to promise the peasants ownership of the land they worked on, the workers ownership of their factories, and the intellectuals freedom, peace, and democracy.

This turned peasants against landlords, workers against capitalists, and intellectuals against the government, allowing the Chinese Communist Party to seize power.

Millions of people consequently died from famines caused by their absurd policies.

In Algeria, communist leader Ahmed Ben Bella stirred up hatred between different religions and ethnic groups: Muslims against Christians, and the Arabs against the French. This became Ben Bella’s springboard to secure communist rule.

The success of the ‘American Dream’ in the USA de-emphasized concepts of social class and made it difficult to concoct class struggle in the United States.

But communism uses whatever opportunity it can to promote division. Using Unions, it magnifies conflicts between employees and employers.

It uses racial divides to foment struggle between different ethnic groups.

It promotes the women’s rights movement to foment struggle against the traditional social structure.

It creates divisions around sexual orientation, using the LGBTQ+ movement.

It divides the believers of different religions and uses “cultural diversity” to challenge traditional Western culture and heritage.

It divides people of different nationalities by pushing for the “rights” of illegal immigrants and creating conflicts between foreigners and citizens.

It pits illegal immigrants and the general public against law enforcement officers.

As society becomes increasingly atomized, a single misstep can trigger a struggle.

The seeds of hatred have by then been planted in the hearts of the masses, and this is precisely the sinister aim of communism.

Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin (pictured below) is widely quoted as saying, “We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn and the like toward those who disagree with us.”

The political tactics used by hard-left socialists in the West employ all sorts of “social justice” issues to incite hatred and intensify social conflict.

According to Leonard Patterson, a former Communist Party member, communists are specifically trained in Leninist tactics for instigating and inflaming conflicts, such as transforming protests into violent riots and street fighting, as well as deliberately fabricating conflict where there was none to be found.

In contemporary America, communist groups have been involved in every large-scale social conflict or riot.

In 1991, footage widely broadcast by the media showed Rodney King, a black resident of Los Angeles, being beaten by white police officers after a high-speed chase.

The widely viewed clip cut out the first 15 seconds of footage, which showed King, a paroled felon, resisting arrest and behaving belligerently, though his vehicle companions had complied with police.

The four officers involved in the incident were ultimately acquitted of criminal charges.

After the verdict, a crowd of protesters outside the Los Angeles Police Department’s headquarters was about to disperse when something suddenly spurred them to riot.

Someone hit the back of a passing car with a metal sign, and the protest swiftly descended into violence, with burning, smashing, and looting.

When asked about the participation of communists in the incident, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block said that there was no question that the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was involved in the rioting, looting, and arson.

During the events, fliers circulated by various communist groups, like the RCP, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), and the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), could be found all over the streets and college campuses.

One of the fliers distributed by the PLP read: “Avenge the King verdict! … all the racist cops must pay! … turn the guns around! Soldiers unite with the workers!”

According to a police officer in the Los Angeles Police Department, people were already handing out such fliers before the verdict was even announced!

Whatever the profusion of organizations that incite riots and violence in Western society today may call themselves, be it ‘Anti-Fascist’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, or ‘Refuse Fascism’, they are all communist groups or proponents of communist ideas.

The violent Antifa group consists of people of various communist leanings, such as anarchists, socialists and social democrats.

Under the guise of exercising free speech, these groups work tirelessly to provoke conflicts in Western society. To understand their real objective, one need only look at a directive by the CPUSA to its members:

“When certain obstructionists (to Communism) become too irritating, label them, after suitable buildups, as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic and use the prestige of antifascist and tolerance organizations to discredit them.

“In the public mind, constantly associate those who oppose us with those names which already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become ‘fact’ in the public mind.

“Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics.”

We’ve been warned!

Thanks to The Epoch Times for much of the content of this article. Images are courtesy of SBS News, Alpha History and Facebook.

Pauline Hanson has attacked Labor’s fundraising push to counter One Nation’s rising polling, describing the ad campaign asking supporters to “chip in $27” as absolutely disgusting.

The Labor Party has urged supporters to donate $27 in an effort to “Prevent One Nation from turning polling momentum into seats” through a series of advertisements appearing on social media.

The push comes as recent polling shows One Nation overtaking Labor on the primary vote for the first time, sharpening debate over the party’s direction ahead of the next federal election.

The ad campaign, first reported on by The Daily Telegraph, also directs users to a Labor donation page titled “Stop One Nation”, which urges supporters to act early to counter the party’s electoral rise.

The ads, which have been running across Meta platforms since June 1, are being promoted on Facebook and Instagram and have reached tens of thousands of users.

According to Meta’s Ad Library, some of the boosted posts have cost between $2,000 and $2,500, with targeting reaching up to 80,000 users.

Speaking exclusively to SkyNews.com.au, Hanson described the campaign as “absolutely disgusting”.

“I can tell you there are 28 million Australians in this country, poor Australians, and we have a Prime Minister on over $600,000 a year,” she said.

“He has how many properties, and he is asking the average Australian to donate to his party?”

She said the government had lost credibility with voters and should not be asking for financial support while people struggle with cost-of-living pressures.

“Labor has lied. They’ve cheated and they have brought in policies that have made life worse for Australians,” she said.

“Go and ask what the Labor Party makes, what they earn, and leave the Australian people alone.”

Hanson (pictured below) said the tone of the fundraising drive showed how disconnected from voters she believed the government had become.

“I just can’t believe that they are brave enough to ask poor Australians to give over their money to fund their campaigns. It’s just disgusting,” she said.

A series of Labor’s fundraising messages circulating online calls on supporters to act immediately.

“To all Labor supporters. Please don’t scroll past this,” one of the advertisements said.

“We are asking you to contribute any amount to Labor’s campaign to take on One Nation today. Ninety-nine per cent of people reading this won’t contribute.

“We hope you’ll be different. If everyone seeing this contributed $27, we’d have the resources to prevent One Nation from turning polling momentum into seats.”

Nationals leader, Senator Matt Canavan, said the response from Labor highlighted what he described as a deeper political problem inside the government.

“This tells me that the Labor Party is addicted to politics,” he told Sky News, when asked about the ad campaign.

“That is their only obsession, and sometimes that’s not too bad, they just fall down when it comes to economics and basic things like running a migration program.”

Canavan said Labor should be focusing on delivering outcomes rather than campaign fundraising.

“I would suggest, and I’m not in the business of providing advice to my Labor Party colleagues, but if they want to improve their political fortunes, they would want to focus on delivering better results for the Australian people,” he said.

“They are in government and they have the power to take action and do things.

“Rather than ask for donations so they can run political ads, I would ask the Labor government to take action to improve the lives of the Australian people, to secure our borders, and to focus on our country again.

“That’s what the Australian people want.”

Canavan said voter frustration was a driving force behind the shift in political support.

“The reason we are seeing so much frustration is because the Labor Party refuses to listen to the Australian people,” he said.

The fundraising appeal has landed as debate intensifies over why support for One Nation is increasing, with cost-of-living pressures emerging as one central factor in political analysis.

According to the latest Sky News Pulse/YouGov poll, One Nation has become the most popular political party in the country as Labor tanks to an all-time low amid ongoing fallout over the government’s broken budget promises.

And much of One Nation’s support has come from younger voters.

“What I find fascinating is the younger ones that are coming across now to One Nation,” Hanson told Sky News host Caleb Bond.

Hanson’s party led the primary vote for the first time in history on 31%, a 25-point increase from the 2025 federal election.

Labor sank to its lowest-ever result of 26%, down 9% from the election.

Prime Minister Albanese’s personal approval rating dropped to 36% in the Newspoll, with the Sky News Pulse poll recording his satisfaction rating at 34%.

Both polls recorded that 60% of voters are dissatisfied with his performance.

This slightly edited article first appeared on SkyNews.com.au and was written by Conor Breslin. Images have been added courtesy of YouTube, Hilary Wardhaugh / Getty Images and The Australian.

Here is a question for your long weekend: Why haven’t you ever seen a climate change protest before the Chinese embassy anywhere? Why is it always the US or capitalism messing up the environment? Why don’t they show up at all when China is a bigger threat to clean air than any US city?

The answer is obvious, but I’ll say it. It was never about the climate but rather capitalism or the US.

Check this out:

In 2024, climate activists in New York City protested alongside anti-Israel protesters at a rally headlined “Climate Justice Means Free Palestine.” Last year, climate change celebrity icon Greta Thunberg tried to storm Israel by sea on a flotilla protesting the country’s war in Gaza, yelling “Free! Free! Palestine!” when she was refused entry.

And, last week, activists from CodePink, a far-left feminist activist group that has received funds from an American expatriate, Neville Roy Singham, living in Shanghai, took a break from their rallies supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Cuba Communist Party to circulate a video on Instagram, attacking a Utah data center project backed by investor Kevin O’Leary.

That’s a busy bunch protesting against the West. Maybe someone should tell them that the clean air in Cuba is due to a collapse of industrial activity. Or we can always remind them of how they treat gays in Palestine or women in general.

As the article points out, these marches were always about hating the West and what we stand for. So don’t be fooled by the slogans or some well-meaning people showing up to protest. The root of all of this is hatred of the West and our individual freedoms.

The right-wing populist wave that broke over much of the democratic world with Brexit and the first Trump presidency in 2016 barely lapped at Australia’s shores. The island nation’s compulsory, preferential voting system and homogeneous, middle-management style politics formed a bulwark against the global tide. Now, that bulwark is starting to crack.

Over the weekend, the populist-right One Nation Party won its first seat in the federal House of Representatives in the Farrer by-election, ending nearly 80 years of unbroken Liberal–National rule in the southern New South Wales electorate.

One Nation’s David Farley took 39.45 percent of the primary vote, and 57.4 percent on a two-party preferred basis. Climate 200-backed independent Michelle Milthorpe took 28.4 percent, while the conservative Coalition parties, Liberals and Nationals, finished third and fourth with 12.4 percent and 9.7 percent, respectively. Labor did not contest the seat.

The federal win follows victory for One Nation in South Australia, with the minor party going from zero to seven seats; four in the lower house and three in the upper house.

It’s a stunning double act from a party that previously only held a small presence in the federal senate and a smattering of state seats, signalling that One Nation now poses a genuine electoral threat to the collapsing Coalition.

The Coalition has already taken notes from the Farrer beating, with shadow treasurer Tim Wilson talking tough on One Nation’s pet issue of immigration in the past few days.

One Nation’s changing fortunes

For nearly 30 years, One Nation has been a ‘cult of personality’ party, its wins and woes mostly driven by surges and dips in the fortunes of its abrasive but ‘fair dinkum’ founder and current leader Pauline Hanson, whose previous life as a fish and chip shop owner and tendency to stumble over her words provides salt-of-the-earth credentials.¹

During the 2016 populist wave, the ‘common sense’ party secured four federal senate seats, its most impressive sweep to that point in time, but it was not able to break past that ceiling.

A few things changed that. After the Liberals suffered a humiliating election defeat in 2025, wealthy Australians started shifting their support from the Coalition to One Nation.

Supporters include Australia’s richest woman, billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart, and Sydney stockbroker Angus Aitken, who told Radio New Zealand last week,

“The biggest change I reckon you’ll see in the next 12 to 18 months is the groundswell of business and wealthy people supporting One Nation who have been frustrated with the Coalition.

“People are just sick of all the red tape and shit across their individual segments of business. They think this is the person and the party that’s going to cut through some of that.”

In December last year, former leader of the Nationals and deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce defected to One Nation, gifting the party its first federal lower house seat and lending it the gravitas of a seasoned politician who has been in government.

Joyce cited concerns over the pursuit of renewable energy and Australia’s immigration policies as reasons for joining the party, giving voice to conservative voters who were no longer seeing their politics represented by the ‘Labor-lite’ Coalition.

One Nation wants to significantly reduce immigration and scrap net zero, which the party says is “destroying Australia” and is “pseudo-speak for global wealth transfer.”² Comparatively, the Coalition proposes moderate immigration reform and only formally abandoned net zero late last year, too little too late for many conservative voters.

Critics have also derided the Coalition for partnering with Labor in enacting some of the most draconian pandemic measures in the Western world, and for supporting rushed hate speech legislation in the wake of the Bondi massacre of 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration in December.

Then in January of this year, polling revealed that One Nation had pulled ahead of the collapsing Coalition in the primary vote for the first time ever, at 22 percent compared to the Liberals’ 21 percent. Liberal leader Sussan Ley resigned, triggering the Farrer by-election and leading to One Nation’s first lower house win.

Anti-majors sentiment has bubbled for several election cycles now, but had failed to convert at the ballot box for three main reasons.

The first is Australia’s two-party preferred system. An alternative party has to consolidate a fair whack of the primary vote to benefit from preferences waterfalling to them. Otherwise, preferences go to the majors.

That’s why Labor was able to win a ‘landslide’ election victory in 2025 despite being led by a weak tea bag, taking two thirds of lower house seats with only a third (34.5 percent) of the primary vote. The election before that, in 2022, Labor won with the lowest primary in almost a century, at 32.6 percent.

Campaigns like ‘Put the Majors Last’, hoping to alchemise Covid-era discontent into political change, achieved very little when it came to ballots cast, despite idealistic content telling voters they could eject majors by preference-funnelling alone.

Outside of the Greens (Labor’s most reliable voting partner) and the Teal independents, in recent history small alternative parties have only managed to capture a few percent of the vote, with One Nation pulling five percent in 2022 and 6.4 percent in 2022.

It was astonishing, then, when One Nation garnered 22.9 percent of the primary vote in the recent South Australian election, and 39.45 percent in Farrer. If One Nation continues to pull a quarter of the primary vote or more, it will become a real threat to the majors, especially the Coalition.

The second reason is the lack of a viable, stable alternative. On the left, the Greens typically secure around 12 percent of the vote and have enough representation in both houses to make a reliable bargaining partner for Labor.

In the centre, the Climate 200-backed Teals upset the applecart in the past two federal elections, gutting the Coalition’s urban, affluent base with approximately 10 seats held, mostly in the lower house. But as the socially liberal and fiscally conservative Teals are nominally independents and not a formal party, their collective impact is to undermine the Coalition.

On the right, the alternative political scene is reactionary, fragmented and under-funded. Serious alternatives, like the Libertarians or Gerard Rennick’s People First Party, get almost no cut-through in the media and have no track record in government.

One Nation typically attracts more votes than the other small right-wing parties, but as mentioned above, with only five to seven percent of the vote, it has been unable to break through.

The landslide Farrer victory consolidating high-profile donor support and the Joyce defection is being taken by some commentators to signal that One Nation is emerging as a viable right-wing option for co-governance in a conservative government.

Third, dirty tricks. The majors and their mates use all manner of tactics to suffocate the smaller parties, sometimes resorting to underhanded measures.

Former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbot played a key role in the legal pursuit of Hanson for electoral fraud, establishing the Australians for Honest Politics Trust to help bankroll civil court cases against the One Nation Party and Hanson herself. Hanson was convicted of electoral fraud, spending eleven weeks in prison before the conviction was overturned.

In another high-profile case, ‘preference whisperer’ Glen Duery was secretly filmed admitting to setting up a fake Sack Dan Andrews party to split the alternative party vote and bolster the incumbent Dan Andrews Labor Government.

And in a move that appeared to be a bad-faith effort to strike out competition from small parties, Labor and the Coalition passed laws in August 2021 that tripled the membership requirement for federal party registration from 500 to 1,500 members and made changes to party name rules. This came into effect just months before the May 2022 federal election, meaning small parties had to quickly triple their registrations and some had to change their names, causing confusion.

That One Nation have been hit with dirty tricks yet remain standing and surging in the polls speaks to their resilience, and Hanson’s in particular.

Despite the obstacles, the timing and conditions for One Nation’s rise are just right.

For the past forty or so years, Australians have been drifting away from the major parties in their allegiances, and they have become increasingly likely to switch teams if they feel another party has something better on offer.

In the 1950s through to the late eighties, the major parties typically attracted over 90 percent of the primary vote. By the 2025 federal election, just 66 percent of voters gave their first preference to Labor or the Coalition. Meanwhile, the share of Australians reporting no alignment with any political party has increased from 14 percent in 2010 to 25 percent in 2025.

This partisan dealignment has slowly eroded the majors’ primary votes, and the centre-right Coalition has been the first to crater. One Nation fills this vacuum, for now.

Institutional trust is also in decline. According to the TrustWatch report from April 2026, only 48 percent of Australians say they trust our national institutions, down from 55 percent last year. In such times, authenticity has caché, and for all its foibles, One Nation has plenty of authenticity. Notably, only 28 percent of One Nation supporters said they had institutional confidence.

Immigration is a pain point in Australia as it is in most Western democracies. The recent Islamic terror attack at Bondi has fuelled anti-Islam sentiment and renewed focus on immigration screening. One Nation has always had a strong position on immigration and keeping Islamic extremists out of the country, and they’re not afraid to say it.

During a cost of living crisis and housing shortage, the fact that One Nation eschews luxury belief politics for straight talk about the issues that economically vulnerable Australians care the most about is appealing.

One Nation has also proved adept at crafting campaigns for the social media era. Through a humorous South Park-style ‘Please Explain’ series — the title is borrowed from a 90s radio hit lampooning Hanson — an anti-woke film, and a pop song topping the Australian iTunes chart, the party has cultivated both viral momentum and a counter-cultural edge that is only amplified when opponents attempt to suppress it.

Looking ahead

Latest national polling has One Nation coming in with 24 percent of the primary vote, second only to Labor (30 percent), and ahead of the Coalition (21 percent).

Polls are one thing: the ballot box is another. The South Australian election in March and now the federal by-election over the weekend mark an upheaval in Australian politics as One Nation’s popularity in the polls translates to actual votes.

If this trend continues, pollsters predict that One Nation could win 12 seats at the next election, enough to become a genuine force in parliament.

On Monday, One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce said that’s exactly what the party intends. On his press rounds after the historic Farrer win, Joyce said the party will target the traditional Labor stronghold of western Sydney next and rejected the idea of a coalition with the Nationals and Liberals, stating that One Nation wants to “go for government.”

1 Hanson was expelled from the party in 2002 due to internal divisions and in 2003 spent 11 weeks in jail after being found guilty of election fraud. The judgement was overturned, and Hanson then ran in several state and federal elections as leader of the United Australia Party and as an independent. She rejoined One Nation in 2013, becoming leader again the following year. After winning four seats in the 2016 federal election, Hanson secured an amendment in the party’s constitution to secure her spot as leader until she chooses to leave, and allowing her to choose her own successor.

The British Australian Community has called on the Australian Government to clarify its position on national identity and the place of Anglo-Celtic Australians following controversies surrounding ANZAC Day commemorations last month.

In a press release issued on 10 May, the organisation addressed disruptions that occurred during ANZAC Day services in Sydney and Melbourne, particularly, the booing of the Acknowledgement of Country delivered by Ray Minniecon at the Sydney Cenotaph.

BAC argued the incident reflected a growing sense of alienation felt by Australians of British and European descent, and raised concerns surrounding the increasing prominence of Acknowledgement of Country ceremonies at national events.

The group highlighted the often-used phrase, “always was, always will be Aboriginal land,” and said many Anglo-Celtic Australians interpret the slogan as implying they are “merely tolerated transient guests” in a nation their ancestors built, defended, and helped shape through generations of settlement and sacrifice.

The statement also referenced comments later made by Ray Minniecon in media interviews, in which he reaffirmed that Australia “always was and always will be Aboriginal land” and described Indigenous Australians as the “traditional owners” and “sovereign owners” of the country.

The British Australian Community argued that such remarks raise questions about the legitimacy of the Australian nation-state and claimed the views expressed were incompatible with the spirit of ANZAC remembrance.

“From the perspective of British descended Australians, to have someone with such extreme views, which are antithetical to the spirit of the ANZAC sacrifices, playing a leading role in the ceremony is an outrage,” the statement said.

The organisation also formally called on the Australian Government to declare its position on the historical and civic role of Anglo-Celtic and European Australians. The statement argued that those communities should be recognised as the people who “settled, built, and shaped the Commonwealth of Australia.”

They outlined questions it wanted clarified by government, including whether Anglo-Celtic Australians should be recognised as the founding people who established one of the world’s “most advanced, egalitarian, and just societies,” whether their cultural and historical concerns deserve recognition comparable to Indigenous Australians, and whether ANZAC servicemen largely fought for a nation that was historically British and European in character.

BAC wrote:

“Specifically, we ask the Government to clarify the following matters:

1. Are Anglo-Celtic and European Australians to be recognised as the people who created, on this continent, one of the most advanced, egalitarian, and just societies on the planet or are we to regard ourselves as second-class inhabitants whose perspectives will always be subordinate to those of Aboriginal heritage?

2. Does the Government accept that the concerns of the Anglo-Celtic founding people—concerns shaped by our British heritage of parliamentary democracy, individual liberty, and a tradition of earned national belonging—are legitimate and deserving of special recognition, just as Indigenous peoples are recognised for their special status as the first residents?

3. Can we agree that the great majority of our service men and women courageously fought, with many falling in combat, for a nation that was almost entirely demographically, culturally, technologically, and historically British and, to a lesser degree, European? It is neither fair nor rational to believe that they would have made such a tremendous sacrifice for a country that considered them invaders and second-class citizens.”

The statement concluded by saying the request was made “not in confrontation, but in good faith,” arguing that clearer recognition of the country’s British-derived foundations would help foster “honesty and mutual respect” rather than deepen division on days intended for national remembrance.

The press release was authorised by Harry Richardson, president of the British Australian Community, and can be read here:

That may sound unfair but that’s reality following our Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s decision to allow the so-called ISIS “brides” back into Australia.

Needless to say, most of the women wearing burqas are not planning to hurt or kill anybody - and many of them would actually prefer not to be forced to wear them.

But the problem is, no-one can determine whether people they see wearing burqas are ISIS supporters who have returned to Australia and who may well prove to be a threat to non-Muslims.

And that’s all thanks to Tony Burke who, despite the opportunity to do so, decided against stopping them from returning to Australia, together with their children.

Over 20 countries have implemented full or partial bans on face-covering veils like the burqa and niqab in public spaces, primarily citing security, secularism, or social integration.

Those nations with bans include France, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Latvia, parts of China (Xinjiang), Tajikistan, Chad, Gabon, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Algeria, Kosovo, and parts of Russia.

An additional problem caused by Tony Burke and his government is the fact that the return of women and children connected to ISIS fighters will set a precedent for others to follow their path, according to a former senior immigration official.

“It does set a precedent in terms of any other ISIS brides that are still in Syria, they will seek to try to return, and we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out,” former Immigration Department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi said.

The Albanese government insists it has not helped the group return to Australia, although a Syrian government spokesperson told the ABC the government “put procedures in place” to receive them. So that was another Albanese government lie!

What will happen in relation to the children, some of whom are ISIS military age teenagers, is still to be divulged.

Some people believe they were merely innocent bystanders - but that is naïve to the extent that they lived amongst ISIS terrorists and were undoubtedly subjected to intense anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda.

Some might also have been subjected to military training, as that usually starts at a very young age within ISIS.

Whilst feeling sorry for children brought up under these conditions, we need to be realistic about their chances of being deradicalized as attempts overseas to do so have been generally unsuccessful.

We also need to accept the reality that children eventually become adults who may be very different to how they were as youngsters.

Take for example this adorable little chap below. Who would ever think he would grow up to be Chancellor of Germany and be responsible for WW2 and the death of 85 million people including 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

That’s right, this is a photo of Adolf Hitler who was far from ‘adorable’ in his later life!

It’s time we all stepped back and took a really long hard look at what’s happening to our country under the Albanese government.

The lies and deception have to stop. We should demand the truth – not ‘their’ truth but the real truth concerning the many serious issues facing us as a nation – and what exactly they are planning to do about them.

The ISIS brides’ issue is just one example of many that have been incompetently handled by the Albanese government.

So now we are stuck with people who may well hate Australia and all that it stands for. They are clearly averse to our values and will likely fight to impose Sharia law just as they are doing in the UK and several mainland European countries.

It’s clear that Tony Burke is the primary culprit in this unhappy saga and should be treated with the contempt he deserves – especially by law-abiding and sensible Muslims who may well suffer the consequences of his actions.

Thanks to NBC News, Getty Images and Facebook for the images.

They’re gaslighting the public—again.

Online misinformation is being blamed for declining vaccination rates in Australia, particularly among children and the elderly. In response, the Australian Government is launching new national immunisation campaigns, with Health Minister Mark Butler pointing to online disinformation as a key driver of public hesitation.

While “vaccine fatigue” has been acknowledged as a contributing factor, the government still appears intent on shifting responsibility away from the very institutions now asking the public to trust them again.

The public is told the problem lies not with the decisions of government or the conduct of health authorities, but with ordinary people who have supposedly been misled. In doing so, they’re reframing their own crisis of credibility as a crisis of information. It’s those who felt duped that have been duped.

But declining trust in political and medical authorities didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was forged and reinforced during the COVID-19 years.

Australia was once a country where public trust in institutions, such as the government, health authorities, and mainstream media, was remarkably high by historical standards. That trust was built over decades, even generations. And it was spent in a moment of madness.

During the pandemic, governments and authorities adopted sweeping, and unprecedented measures: prolonged lockdowns, blanket mandates, and restrictions applied broadly across populations regardless of individual risk or consent.

At the same time, the threat was often exaggerated. Health officials would hold press conferences, urging the public to call an ambulance at the first sign of symptoms, only for government representatives to warn soon after that ambulance services were under critical strain. The result was a constant sense of alarm. It was fear-mongering upon fear-mongering, crisis upon crisis.

Remember this?

Then came the vaccines, which were initially presented as a near-complete solution to the crisis. Over time, reports of adverse effects began to surface, yet discussion around them was often suppressed, particularly on major platforms like Meta Platforms and Google, under policies aimed at limiting “misinformation” during the global rollout.

Only years later has coverage of serious adverse outcomes begun to appear in mainstream outlets, including stories of individuals experiencing serious complications, and struggling through slow or opaque compensation processes.

Even ABC News Australia has reported on the overwhelming paperwork—hundreds of pages of medical reports, legal letters, and correspondence with the federal government—that victims are forced to wade through in years-long battles with the vaccine compensation scheme.

For many Australians, it’s not just that adverse effects occurred, but that open discussion of the risks was effectively prohibited. If you weren’t being censored by social media companies, there was a psychological campaign that turned the public into the militant arm of the government, so that neighbour turned against neighbour.

Caldron Pool, for example, was one of the few Australian platforms that consistently challenged the mandates. And it came at a cost. We were demonised, maligned, and in some circles effectively rendered “untouchable,” including within parts of the Christian community. Many in positions of leadership not only complied with every government directive but went further, framing each mandate as a practical outworking of Christian love.

The public became narrative gate-keepers—shunning family members, demanding compliance, reporting neighbours to the police—and many relationships were ruined as a result. Trust was eroding on every social level.

This is the context in which so-called “misinformation” now flourishes.

When people feel they’ve been misled, manipulated, or blatantly lied to they become less willing to accept official narratives. Suspicion inevitably fills the void left by lost credibility. In that sense, so-called misinformation is often downstream of a deeper problem: namely, a breakdown in trust between citizen and authority.

But blaming the public for that breakdown isn’t a meaningful solution. Any efforts to “combat misinformation”—one of the government’s favourite endeavours—only risk reinforcing the very environment that caused the distrust in the first place. When governments position themselves as the ultimate arbiters of truth, science, and morality, while dismissing dissent as dangerous, they don’t end up rebuilding confidence. They solidify scepticism.

As we noted in our submission opposing the Government’s 2024 misinformation and disinformation bill:

While the government may lament the prevalence of misinformation and “conspiracy theories” online, what they fail to grasp is that these things are largely the product of perceived dishonest power – which was only heightened during the Covid-era.

When the government, or the mainstream media, lies to the public, by feeding them what many believe to be blatant propaganda, it creates a suspicious people hesitant to heed the warnings or advice from those who have previously abused their trust, even when they are speaking the truth.

As such, we do not need the government to curb our freedoms to protect us from potential dangers. Freedom has never been a danger to the people. It has always been a danger to the powerful.

Censorship doesn’t protect the people from the spread of “misinformation.” It protects state-approved information from being challenged. It silences critics, undermines “democracy,” and stifles dissent, ensuring that only one approved narrative prevails.

If trust is to be restored, the starting point cannot be more messaging, more campaigns, or more attempts to police information. It must be accountability.

That means acknowledging that credibility was not stolen by fringe voices online. It was forfeited. It means admitting that communication was overly certain, dissent was wrongly punished, and the balance between public health and public trust was squandered.

It means treating citizens not as passive recipients of state-approved information, but as adults capable of weighing evidence when it is presented honestly. It means holding accountable every government employee, official, bureaucrat, and social leader who misled the public and wielded their positions of power and influence to abuse the rights of others.

Until that happens, no amount of government campaigns or advertising will reverse the trend because the issue was never simply misinformation. It was trust, and how those in positions of power squandered it.

The controlled demolition of Australia’s economy continues, as one of our last two remaining oil refineries just happens to go up in flames.

What are the odds.

From their ABC:

An “unprecedented” fire has broken out at one of Australia’s two operational oil refineries, with residents in parts of Geelong told to stay indoors due to smoke.

A watch and act has since been issued for suburbs in Geelong, with residents warned to close windows to keep out hazardous smoke.

Fire Rescue Victoria (FRV) was called to the Viva Energy Refinery at 11:05pm following multiple reports of “explosions and flames”.

FRV Assistant Chief Fire Officer Michael McGuinness said the fire started in the “mogas” section of the plant where motor gasoline is produced.

“There’s been some sort of leak, there’s hydrocarbons, flammable liquids which very readily caught fire,” he said.

“It was burning in an area of approximately 30 metres by 30 metres. There have been several small explosions.”

FRV said all staff have been accounted for, but the fire is not yet under control.

Given that the Geelong oil refinery had been operating at 100% capacity and maintenance work was delayed in order to keep up with demand, it is entirely possible this was an accident. In which case we can point our fingers squarely at successive Australian governments whose wilful negligence allowed all but two of our oil refineries to shut down.

Prime Minister Albanese has just spent a week or so begging Asia for more oil. It’s all for nought now.

Sabotage is of course entirely possible. Australia has sent personnel and equipment to the Middle East. The government insists it is simply for defensive purposes only, thus we are not at war. This is pure cope, as aiding in defence frees up other resources for offence. Of course we’re at war.

Therefore multiple factions have the motivation to further exacerbate Australia’s already fragile fuel crisis, either to dissuade or encourage further involvement. As The XYZ has reported, the oil crisis doesn’t simply mean that our economy grinds to a halt – it means Australia starves.

The concept of Fifth Generation Warfare or unrestricted warfare, whereby states weaponise industrial “accidents”, media and social media manipulation, election tampering and psychological conditioning to achieve war aims, means that there is no longer a distinction between the front line and the rear, between combatant and civilian. Frankly, we all deserve to march this Anzac Day.

Communist ecoterrorism is also entirely possible. They have been sabotaging oil and gas infrastructure, food and chemical production facilities the world over for years. It’s why I refer to Western rulers as mere managers. “American” imperial ambitions certainly appear to be lining up quite well with the WEF’s determination to make us eat the bugs.

One more observation. A lot more people will be taking public transport. Keep your eyes open.

In the 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail there is an absurdist scene called ‘Tis But a Scratch. The scene plays out as follows:

The Black Knight loses limb after limb. A bemused King Arthur finds that fighting a lunatic follows no sane rules. Arthur chops the Black Knight’s left arm off. The Black Knight declares “tis but a scratch”. Arthur chops the Black Knight’s right arm off and declares “Victory is Mine”. The armless Black Knight hops forward and kicks Arthur, saying “had enough have you?” because Arthur has stopped fighting. “

“Look you stupid bastard, you’ve got no arms left”

And yet the ‘fight’, such as it is, continues.

“I’m invincible!” the Black Knight declares, while deprived of arms and leg. “You’re a loony” Arthur replies.

The entire scene, if written today, could be considered a comment on the US-Iran ‘war’ and declarations of Iranian victory. It’s a satire on the nature of fanaticism, contained within an absurdist physical and slapstick comedy routine.

People watching were not supposed to believe the Black Knight. The comedy is in the gap between the reality of his utter defeat, the futility of his continued aggression, and the declarations of victory he is making.

Today, though, not many people do comedy or sanity that well. The world’s entire mainstream and alternative media are on the side of the Black Knight so fully that they, like him, declare his victory.

We can’t blame this on Iranian propaganda. The Iranian mullah’s aren’t very good at propaganda. Perhaps you’ve seen the ludicrous clip they released of a ‘captured’ US airman, hooded with face and features concealed, but standing at around five foot four with a portly frame? A short time later the US announced the successful rescue of the real airman. The mullah’s try propaganda, but it’s as comically inept as their fighting has proven to be. They don’t need to be good at either.

Terrorism targets civilians, not armies. And the mullah’s don’t have to persuade Iranian citizens to support them. They just execute the ones who don’t. Having concentrated for 47 years on terror at home and abroad, both their conventional forces and their propaganda releases are pathetic.

Even as recently as the day’s of Saddam’s Comical Ali spokesperson, people were able to see the difference between on the ground reality and absurd claims of victory from the losing side. Today, that rational assessment is dead.

Let’s be clear on what has happened overall since October 7th first prompted all this, and what happened prior to that.

The mullahs spent 47 years building a terror network that spanned Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Qatar, agents in neighboring Muslim nations, credible reports of agents in Obama’s administration, and operatives across the Middle East. They funded international terrorism and they were a feared regional power, a major player that even opposed rivals (the Saudis, the Israelis, to some extent the Turks) were cautious of and very worried about. They had alliances with Russia, China and Qatar. They had terrorist proxies in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

The Israelis methodically smashed their way through every part of this 47 year strategy aimed by Iran primarily at the destruction of Israel and secondarily at the destruction of nations like the US and the UK.

Hamas were smashed in Gaza. Tunnels found and collapsed. Leaders killed. Most of those who took part in October 7th killed. Brilliant operations like the pager attack devastating the Hamas chain of command and illustrating the extreme competence of Israeli intelligence. Hostages rescued, or Hamas forced to return their bodies if already killed. Hamas capability has been massively downgraded in every way-bases, stockpiles, ammunition, personnel, leadership.

The left arm chopped off.

Hezbollah isn’t faring much better. That is what the current Israeli attacks on Lebanon are about. The same necessary process. The right arm hangs by a thread.

And what about the body of the beast, Iran itself? For 47 years they attacked with immunity and every US President was either too afraid to respond or, like Obama, probably more ideologically aligned with mullahs and terrorists than with genuine US interests.

Set aside what happened with neocon wars where a combination of absurd liberal nation building hopes and vast in it for the contracts corruption ruined initial success. Neither of those factors, the ideological stupidity or the vast corruption, is a problem with this US administration. Look instead at the real condition of the Black Knight.

Iranian strategy and regional power has been chopped into pieces.

The US has proven it can attack Iran directly and with very little comeback.

CHOP. 8,000 or more targets hit. Iran itself being hit, not just its proxies.

CHOP. Iranian air defenses obliterated. The Iranian air force destroyed. Tech supplied by Russia and China shown to be ineffective.

CHOP. The same with the Iranian Navy. the conventional forces incredibly vulnerable. What’s able to ‘block Hormuz’ is not a scary fleet able to face the US Navy. It’s drones and light craft and mines, able to attack civilian shipping. This is Iran’s sole area of success, and the success is a lot smaller than people think. What’s been exposed here is the long standing apparent decision in the West that minesweepers are obsolete.

CHOP. The cherished nuclear program destroyed. Iran spent vast sums with large scale assistance and advice from Russia and China building gigantic, very well protected underground facilities. The nuke program was real and significant, both as infrastructure and as threat. It’s gone. It will be sensible to pursue the enriched uranium that made the threat very urgent, but the other parts of building a bomb have been obliterated.

The current ceasefire, compared to the Monty Python sketch, is the moment that Trump as King Arthur declares “look you stupid bastards, you’ve got no arms left.” Indeed, this is a better way to read the notorious Easter Tweet as well than the reading that was given by Trump haters (I told the silly bastards, repeatedly, that Trump was not about to drop a nuke on Tehran. Anyone sensible knew that. Most western ‘experts’ didn’t).

There is no rational way to say that Iran is winning. It’s rational to say that the hoped for Iranian uprising hasn’t come (partly because earlier delay let the regime slaughter 30-40,000 people). Its rational to say that a lack of effective minesweepers has been exposed, and its certainly rational to say that the cowardice and uselessness of western ‘allies’ and NATO has been exposed (particularly leftist governments who are pro open borders and pro Islam, like Spain, or who have aggressive Muslim populations they are afraid of, like the UK).

But several of these points merely confirm existing Trump administration suspicions. They don’t signal Iranian victory. The reality is that the US and Israel acting together have been quite sufficient to shatter Iran as a regional power. And what’s exposed too (as was exposed with Venezuela) is that Chinese and Russian backing is all mouth and no trousers. When it comes to the crunch they can’t offer, or don’t want to offer, serious support to their proxies. Just as Iran could act through Hamas but not protect them, China or Russia can act through Iran but not protect them.

This geopolitical reality has been entirely missed by those claiming that that the Black Knight has won. But why can they miss something so obvious? Why can they regard the bombed and humiliated nation as the victor? As this post sarcastically explained, those citing Iranian triumph or Trump humiliation are completely at odds with reality:

Surely the answer lies in who they WANT to win. as far as mainstream media and alt media turncoats are concerned, they were always going to declare it this way. Whatever happened, they would call it a Trump failure-that is their job. They aren’t reporting, they are framing. While Iranian or Hamas propaganda is often amusingly amateurish, the propaganda of their western backers is much more sophisticated and influential.

The climate science world (‘settled’ division) is in shock following the discovery in ancient ice cores that levels of carbon dioxide remained stable as the world plunged into an ice age around 2.7 million years ago. Levels of CO₂ at around 250 parts per million (ppm) were said to be lower than often assumed with just a 20 ppm movement recorded for the following near three million-year period. In addition, no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period. Massive decreases in temperature with occasional interglacial rises appear to have occurred without troubling ‘greenhouse’ gas levels, and this revelation has caused near panic in activist circles.

The assumed level three million years ago of CO₂ was around 400 ppm, a convenient mark that has been used to explain the subsequent ice age and a drop to 250 ppm. Due to the recently published paper, this explanation has become more problematic and natural climate variation is correctly noted to have occurred with the temperature changes. Alas, similar explanations are mostly ignored in discussing today’s climate changes in the interests of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Some cling desperately to a dominant CO₂ role, including one of the authors of the findings published in Nature. The co-author states that the results suggest even greater climate sensitivity to the warming effect of CO₂. In short, there is a great deal of applying the laws of physics and chemistry to one era, but failing to extend the same courtesy to another.

The title of the paper, produced by 17 America-based scientists, was enough to set alarm bells ringing in the ‘settled’ science, Net Zero-obsessed community: ‘Broadly stable atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ levels over the past three million years.’ A related paper examining ocean heat content derived from the ice core record was also published. Carrie Lear, Professor of Past Climates and Earth System Changes at Cardiff University, claimed that the papers “don’t rewrite the role of CO₂, they underline how sensitive the climate system is… that is why today’s rapid CO₂ rise is so alarming”.

Ah, yes. Even if CO₂ movements are minimal, probably within a margin of potential error, they are still responsible for large variations in temperature. The laws of climate science are ‘settled’ – if the trace atmospheric gas CO₂ is rising, falling or generally stable, it is almost wholly responsible for large movements in global temperature. Under this rather shaky assumption, humans must stop burning hydrocarbons and return to a neo-Malthusian pre-industrial age.

Study lead author Julia Marks-Peterson noted: “We definitely were a bit surprised. If correct, the findings may suggest that even small changes in greenhouse gas levels could trigger major shifts in climate.” That’s a little bit of a scary thought, she added, possibly with an eye on future grant funding. “May suggest” is doing a lot of the work here, and it may also be suggested that more plausible opinions are available.

Quoted in New Scientist magazine, Tim Naish, Professor of Earth Science at Victoria University in New Zealand, said it was “way too early to throw the baby out with the bathwater”. Perish the thought that baby should be given its marching orders, ending a science-lite 40-year demonisation of CO₂ and related promotion of a hard-Left Net Zero dream.

The latest Nature-published research gives a snapshot from ancient Antarctica ‘blue’ ice drilled in the Allan Hills area. It looks back further in time past the usual 800,000 ice core records. The key finding is that over the last three million years, when sea levels fell and ice periods intensified, the level of the main ‘greenhouse’ gases remained remarkably stable. For the first time, the work has pushed the direct gas measurements back into the late Pliocene era. Over the last three million years moving into the Pleistocene, global temperatures showed a long-term cooling trend of several degrees Celsius, interrupted by increasingly large interglacial oscillations. Interglacial temperature swings, as in the current Holocene, often see temperatures rise by 5°C and more.

Critics seeking to downplay ice core evidence often suggest it is too imprecise to provide a wholly accurate record of gas levels and temperature. But it is accurate enough to give a broad cyclical insight. It remains the source of some of the best data we have on the past climate. It is undoubtedly more accurate than most proxy evidence from millions of years ago. But whatever the evidence used, it is hard to detect any obvious and continuous link between CO₂ and temperature across the entire geological record going back 600 million years to the start of abundant life on Earth. Certainly none to justify the political notion that humans control the climate thermostat by burning hydrocarbons.

In fact the evidence is so slim that Les Hatton, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science at Kingston University, was recently able to determine from ice core records that 100-year rises of 1.1°C in the current interglacial, which started 20,000 years ago, have occurred in one in six centuries. Going back 150,000 years, the frequency was around one in six to one in 20 centuries. None of these findings suggest that current warming is either unusual or primarily caused by human activity. Needless to say, none of these findings trouble the headline writers in narrative-addicted mainstream media.

Walk through a modern supermarket for a moment and look carefully.

Rows of fruit in perfect colour. Meat sealed in tidy packages. Bread stacked in quiet abundance. Freezers full of meals from cuisines most people would not have recognised two generations ago. Forty thousand products under bright lights, available seven days a week.

It is one of the quiet miracles of modern civilisation.

We rarely think about it anymore.

But the abundance resting on those shelves depends on something most shoppers never see.

Oil.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Modern food is, in a very real sense, rearranged petroleum.

For most of human history, agriculture ran on three energy sources: sunlight, human muscle, and animal muscle.

A farm in medieval Europe was essentially a solar energy system. Crops captured sunlight through photosynthesis. Animals converted those crops into labour. Humans organised the work and hoped the weather cooperated.

Productivity was low. Harvests were uncertain. Entire communities could be pushed into crisis by a single failed season.

Agriculture produced food, but it did so slowly and precariously. Then fossil fuels entered the field.

The first transformation was mechanical. Horses and oxen gave way to tractors. Irrigation pumps driven by diesel replaced the limits of rainfall. Mechanical harvesters replaced large armies of seasonal labour.

The scale of farming expanded dramatically. One farmer who once fed a household could now feed a village. In many modern economies, a single farmer produces enough food to sustain more than a hundred people.

Cheap energy did not simply transform industry. It transformed the farm.

The deeper revolution, however, came from chemistry.

Modern agriculture depends heavily on nitrogen fertiliser produced through the Haber–Bosch process. The chemistry itself pulls nitrogen from the air and converts it into ammonia that crops can absorb. But the process requires enormous energy inputs, and those inputs come overwhelmingly from natural gas.

The result is a quiet but extraordinary fact. A substantial share of the world’s food supply is effectively produced by the natural gas industry.

Estimates vary, but many researchers suggest that roughly half of the global population is fed by crops grown using synthetic fertiliser.

The Green Revolution was not purely agricultural. It was petrochemical.

Modern farming is therefore not simply a biological activity taking place in fields. It is part of a much larger industrial system.

Tractors the size of small houses cultivate land using satellite guidance. Diesel pumps draw water from deep aquifers. Fertiliser factories operate hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from the farms that depend on their output.

A medieval farmer needed a plough and a horse. A modern farmer requires diesel deliveries, replacement parts manufactured in global supply chains, fertiliser plants powered by natural gas, and transport systems capable of moving enormous volumes of crops across continents.

The farm has become an industrial site that happens to grow plants.

And industry runs on energy.

Now widen the lens beyond the farm itself.

Modern food systems assume that distance is cheap.

Beef travels from Brazil to European markets. Soy grown in Argentina feeds livestock in China. Apples harvested in New Zealand appear in northern supermarkets long after local orchards have gone dormant.

In the late nineteenth century, refrigeration changed the meaning of distance in food. Before that, meat was either eaten locally or preserved by being salted, dried, or smoked. Freshness did not travel. The breakthrough came with mechanical refrigeration and the first successful refrigerated shipping lines, which allowed frozen and chilled meat from Australia and New Zealand to reach British markets in usable condition. That was not just a commercial innovation. It was a sanitary one. Cold did what distance and time had always undone: it slowed bacterial growth, stabilised food, and made it possible to handle, store, and transport perishable goods without rapid spoilage. Modern food safety, the expectation that meat can sit in a cabinet for days without becoming dangerous, rests on that cold chain.

But refrigeration is not an independent system. It is an energy system. From the earliest ammonia compressors driven by coal-fired engines to modern refrigerated containers powered by diesel generators and electricity grids, the cold chain has always depended on abundant, continuous energy. Every refrigerated warehouse, every supermarket freezer, every chilled truck is a small, ongoing claim on the same underlying fuel base. Remove that energy, and refrigeration does not degrade gracefully. It stops.

The global food system is not merely agriculture. It is a vast logistical network that spans the planet. Container ships move grain across oceans. Refrigerated trucks distribute food across national highway systems. Fertiliser travels thousands of kilometres before it ever reaches a field. Oil made those distances economically manageable. In effect, cheap energy turned the world into one interconnected farm.

But distance has a way of returning when the cost of energy rises.

Even inside the supermarket itself, the system depends on speed rather than stockpiles. Most stores hold only a few days’ worth of inventory. This is not recklessness. It is the logical outcome of a supply chain optimised for efficiency. Food moves continuously through a chain that rarely stops. It moves from farm to processor, from processor to distributor, and from distributor to supermarket. Efficiency keeps prices low and shelves full. It also removes the buffers that once protected the system from disruption. When the flow slows, the shelves empty quickly.

Efficiency is a remarkable achievement. But it is not the same thing as resilience.

One way to understand the transformation of agriculture is through the language of energy. Traditional farming largely ran on solar income. Industrial farming runs on sunlight organised by fossil fuels. Fertiliser production requires natural gas. Farm machinery consumes diesel. Food processing, refrigeration, packaging, and long-distance transport all draw energy from the same industrial system.

And this is where the present moment stops being abstract. In the past few days, the war in the Middle East has moved beyond threats to actual damage. Iran’s strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex has knocked out roughly 17 per cent of Qatar’s LNG export capacity, with two LNG trains reportedly damaged badly enough to be offline for years. Before that, Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field and the Asaluyeh processing hub attached to it. Trump then warned Iran against any repeat strike on Qatar, while reports elsewhere described an explicit threat against the rest of South Pars. This is not diplomatic theatre. It is the targeting of the machinery that keeps global energy moving.

That matters because modern agriculture is downstream from all of it. Natural gas is not just something that heats homes. It is the feedstock for fertiliser. When LNG capacity is destroyed, when gas fields are hit, when shipping risks rise, and cargoes are redirected, fertiliser costs move with them. Oil does the same work elsewhere in the system. It powers farm machinery, road freight, shipping, and cold storage. What begins as a strike on energy infrastructure quickly becomes a rise in the cost of producing food.

You can see it already, in small ways. A few cents more at the bowser. A missing brand on a supermarket shelf. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that looks like a crisis.

That is how these things begin.

But take the worst-case scenario seriously for a moment. Not as a thought experiment, but as a baseline.

Australia sits in an especially brittle position. It exports enormous volumes of LNG, yet the infrastructure to direct it locally quickly does not exist. And LNG is not a substitute for oil.

Petrol stations run dry first. Panic buying will empty the system even before the boats stop arriving.

No fuel, no logistics. No logistics, no supermarkets. It is a brutally simple chain.

The initial shock is psychological as much as physical. Households do not wait for empty shelves. They anticipate them. They buy early, buy more, and strip the system of its buffer. What looked like a supply problem becomes a behaviour problem, which then becomes a real supply problem.

It’s an unstoppable feedback loop once confidence disappears.

After that first shock, the deeper damage begins.

Fertiliser supply tightens hard enough that farmers pull back immediately, not cautiously. Application rates drop across an entire planting cycle. That decision is invisible to most people at the time. Fields still look the same. Tractors still move.

But agriculture runs on delayed consequences. What is not put into the soil now is not harvested later.

At the same time, diesel, if available at all, becomes scarce enough to change behaviour. Marginal land is not planted. Harvesting decisions become selective. Transport begins to falter across a continent where distance is not an inconvenience but a governing reality.

Distance itself becomes an enemy.

Imported food does not provide relief. It simply does not arrive as global supply tightens and other countries begin quietly, then openly, protecting their own populations. Export restrictions appear first as temporary measures, then harden into policy.

Australia is not immune to that logic. It participates in it.

So the system does not collapse in a single dramatic moment. It degrades in layers.

First, the servos become unreliable. Then the shelves become inconsistent. Then the prices become prohibitive.

Abundance does not disappear. It thins. Variety goes first. Then affordability. Then trust. And once trust goes, everything accelerates.

People do not shop for what they need. They shop for what they fear they will not be able to get tomorrow. Businesses hold inventory rather than sell it. Governments intervene with price controls here, export restrictions there, usually just enough to distort signals without restoring stability.

Everyone begins acting as if scarcity is inevitable. That’s how it becomes so, even before the physical logistics make it so.

The modern world did not solve food security. It outsourced it to energy and logistics, then built a culture that forgot the dependency. No supply lines, no abundance.

For a long time, those supply lines were so stable they became invisible. Supermarkets looked like systems of production rather than systems of distribution. It felt as though food simply existed.

But it does not simply exist. It has to be moved.

And if the movement stops, if gas fields burn, if LNG trains go offline, if oil does not come in or go out, then what Australia faces is famine.

Not a theatrical collapse on day one, but a fast-moving unravelling.

Shelves empty, then stay empty. Distribution breaks, then cannot be restored. Production falls, then fails to recover. A country with food somewhere, but not where people are.

Since World War II, politicians have been able to manage crises rhetorically. They rely on spin and process. They will believe that it will work again, just as it always has.

Until it doesn’t.

Last weekend I took the family to Sydney for a karate tournament.

It is the sort of thing that we wouldn’t have thought of as an event a decade ago. Load the car, fill the tank, drive a few hours down the motorway, spend the day quoting Cobra Kai one-liners, head home again.

But along the way, something unsettling hit me.

This was beginning to feel already like a bit of a luxury thing to do.

The petrol alone made that clear. What once felt like a routine weekend outing now carries the faint sense of indulgence. A long drive for a hobby. A casual trip between cities. The assumption that fuel will always be cheap enough, abundant enough, and available enough to make such things ordinary.

For most of our lives, we have taken that assumption for granted. Petroleum and its derivatives are the blood of modern civilisation. We take it for granted that its circulation will always supply our needs.

But civilisation is held together by logistics that most people never see.

The supermarket shelves appear full as if by magic. Aircraft cross continents overnight. Container ships arrive in Australian ports stacked high with goods from every corner of the planet. Petrol stations glow under bright lights along the motorway, dispensing energy with the casual ease of a vending machine.

Behind that apparent simplicity lies an enormous machinery of pipelines, tankers, refineries, ports, shipping insurance markets, naval patrols, and financial clearing systems.

Modern life rests on that machinery, and the heart of that machinery is being exploded as you read this.

It’s a civilisational heart attack, and we get a front row seat to live through it.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the narrowest and most important arteries in the global economy. Roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes through that thin stretch of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. Tankers leaving the Persian Gulf must navigate a corridor only a few dozen miles wide before entering the wider Indian Ocean.

It’s the narrowest artery in the most vital area of the global circulatory system. Now Iran is blocking it off.

By attacking the oil infrastructure of the Gulf Cooperation Council states and effectively shutting down traffic through Hormuz, Tehran has not merely launched a regional military operation. It has struck directly at the logistical foundation of the modern economic system.

Oil is often described as fuel for cars. That description is convenient but misleading.

Oil is far more than a transportation fuel. It is the industrial blood of modern civilisation.

Petrochemicals form the basis of plastics, synthetic fibres, pharmaceuticals, bitumen, and countless industrial materials. Aviation depends on refined petroleum products. Global shipping runs on bunker fuel. Fertiliser production relies heavily on hydrocarbons. Manufacturing, construction, and modern agriculture all draw deeply from the same energy well.

The plastic case on your phone. The insulation on electrical wires. The paint on your walls. The foam in your mattress. The polyester in your clothes. The tyres on your car. The paint on your car. The seats in your car. The dashboard in your car. The bitumen under your car.

The syringes in hospitals. The packaging around sterile equipment. The fertilisers that grow modern crops. The pesticides that protect them. The shampoo in your shower. The nylon in sportswear. The resins in wind turbine blades. All of these things begin in petrochemical plants.

We do not merely burn oil. We build our civilisation out of it. Remove oil from the system, and the consequences extend far beyond the price of petrol.

Industrial societies function because they possess vast reservoirs of concentrated energy. Oil provides that energy in a form that is dense, portable, and easily stored. It is the quiet enabler of almost everything that makes modern life possible.

But energy alone is not the whole story.

The global oil market is also the hidden pillar of the international financial system.

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order in the early 1970s, the United States has effectively anchored the world economy around the pricing of oil in US dollars. Nations require dollars to purchase energy, and therefore hold dollar reserves. Those reserves flow back into American financial markets, reinforcing the dollar’s position as the central currency of global trade.

Energy and finance thus became intertwined.

Oil stabilised the dollar. The dollar stabilised the trading system.

The result was a monetary architecture that supported the enormous expansion of globalisation over the past half-century. Supply chains stretched across continents. Manufacturing dispersed across oceans. Consumer societies in the West imported goods from everywhere while exporting the currency used to purchase them.

Yet this entire arrangement rests on something older that I wrote about in 2024: control of the sea lanes.

For roughly five hundred years, the global trading system has been underwritten by Western naval power. The Portuguese opened the ocean routes in the fifteenth century. The Dutch and the British turned those routes into commercial highways. In the twentieth century, the United States Navy inherited the task of keeping the oceans open.

Global capitalism was never simply a matter of markets and finance. It was also a matter of security.

Merchants will ship goods across oceans only if they believe those goods will arrive safely. That belief depends on naval patrols, international law, and an intricate web of maritime insurance markets centred historically in London.

Trade, in other words, requires both protection and trust. For centuries, the Western maritime powers provided both.

The Persian Gulf oil trade is one of the most important pieces of that structure. Tankers move through Hormuz under the assumption that the sea lanes will remain open and insurable. Shipping firms calculate risk accordingly. Insurance companies price policies based on the expectation that major naval powers will prevent sustained disruption.

But those assumptions begin to unravel the moment a chokepoint becomes a battlefield.

Insurance premiums spike. Shipping companies hesitate. Naval escorts become necessary. Even if tankers can technically pass through the strait, the cost of doing so may become prohibitive.

The system has a myocardial infarction.

Since World War II at least, the Western world has lived inside the illusion that global integration is permanent. Goods flow effortlessly across oceans. Supply chains stretch thousands of kilometres without serious interruption. Distance itself seems to have been conquered.

Cheap energy and secure sea lanes created that illusion.

Yet history offers a more sobering perspective. Large trade networks have collapsed before. The Bronze Age trading system disintegrated around 1200 BC. The Roman Mediterranean fractured in late antiquity. The Silk Road periodically vanished for centuries when political and military conditions made long-distance commerce too dangerous.

Arrogant neocon think tank intellectuals in America told us we had reached the End of History in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union. The ‘mad mullahs’ say otherwise, and are now bringing history back with a Shahed drone bang.

Iran’s attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure and its effective closure of Hormuz represent more than a regional escalation. They mark a signal event in the slow unravelling of the economic order that has shaped the modern world.

The consequences will not appear overnight. Civilisational systems rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. Instead, they begin to strain. Prices rise. Supply chains falter. Governments scramble to stabilise markets that were once taken for granted.

Gradually, the underlying assumptions of everyday life begin to change.

A long drive to Sydney becomes something you think about before filling the tank.

For the past half century, the industrial world has lived within a system built on cheap energy, secure sea lanes, and a financial architecture tied closely to the global oil trade. That system produced extraordinary prosperity, but it also created an illusion of permanence.

Now the foundations are beginning to crack.

Modern civilisation likes to imagine that its problems are primarily political or technological. Yet the deeper structures of history are often logistical. Empires rise when they master the movement of energy and goods across distance. They falter when those flows become uncertain.

The tankers burning in the Persian Gulf are therefore more than images of regional conflict.

They’re a planetary blood clot blocking the most important coronal artery of our civilisation.

THIS IS A SPIRITUAL WAR BETWEEN GOOD & EVIL AND IT IS LATE IN THE DAY--TIME FOR A LINE IN THE SAND

1836--At the Battle of the Alamo in Texas--Col. William Travis drew a line in the sand with his sword, according to the lone survivor of the battle.

He told his heroic band of frontiersmen and militiamen that coming on his side of that line meant almost certain death in the coming days as the small Catholic mission was surrounded by the overwhelming Mexican forces of General Santa Anna.

Now, satanic forces of evil have infiltrated most Western Nations due to weak leaders installed by Globalists who seek the downfall of our nations and heritage.

“EPIC”--East Plano Islamic Center--is to be the first of many jihadist compounds around the state, nation and world--unless we stop them now. And I do mean NOW.

UNDERSTAND ME BROTHERS, THIS IS NOT A RELIGION

It was not until I tried to read the Quran that I saw it. Islam is a cult built around an orphaned goat-herder abandoned to his wealthy uncle in Mecca.

Mecca was a vibrant trading centre along the caravan routes of the day whose leaders wisely made it a haven for travellers of all faiths by creating ‘The Hajj’ with statutes and places of worship for all manner of pre-Islamic faiths,

The orphan boy, Mohammed, was illiterate but learned all he could of these faiths by listening and was particularly drawn to Christianity.

In fact, when Mohammed started his own cult, his words and sayings in Mecca were in high praise of Jesus and His mother--but after 13 years, all the young man could collect as ‘followers’ were a handful of friends and relatives--estimated at about 60.

That is the point Mohammed became radicalized and turned to the sword to increase his following.

He began raiding peaceful trading caravans--robbing and enslaving them--and came upon the idea of forcing them to either join his band of marauders by pledging he was their ‘prophet’--or die by beheading.

Needless to say, while this was quite a good system for building his cult numbers and growing his purse, this was not good for ‘business’ so he was run out of Mecca.

MOHAMMED WAS BANNED FROM MECCA AND FLED TO MEDINA TO LIVE WITH JEWISH TRIBES

Three Jewish groups lived in Medina. They took Mohammed and his bandits into their care perhaps intending to use them as protective mercenaries, but as would become the cult’s modus operandi to this day--the concept of hijrah--once restored to strength, they turned on their benefactors in a massive slaughter.

According to America’s Public Broadcasting System (PBS) no less, Mohammed beheaded700 Jewish men--saving the leader’s 12-year old daughter as his sex slave--whom he then raped all night according to his own scribes. (https://www.pbs.org/muhammad/ma_jews.shtml), selling the remaining women and children into slavery.

QURAN IS INTENTIONALLY OUT OF SEQUENCE TO HIDE THE ‘CHANGING’ MESSAGE

Reading the Quran as published for the infidel is like trying to learn about glass by holding a handful of sand. It is only when put in sequence of events--as the one above--that you see the dramatic shift in Mohammed from hopeful saint to a complete demon.

When his sayings were contradictory--for example, honouring all religions in his early days to ordering the murder of all Christians, Jews and Kaffir (non-believers) in later days--Mohammed told his scribes that whatever he said last was ‘Sharia’.

So--it’s murder everybody that’s not a muzzie in the end--leading to my point.

AS A BEGINNING--WE MUST BAN SHARIA LAW

March 3rd, such a ban is on the Republican primary ballot in Texas. It will be a bell-weather for us all in my opinion, as success tends to spawn courage in others.

Sharia is a compendium of everything Mohammed said--or said ‘last’ we should say--and what he did while alive.

That’s a rather broad slate of demonic activity for anyone but a Muslim or other forms of Satanism.

This East Tennessee billboard in the United States may give you an idea of what we are allowing to sneak in on cats paws to destroy us:

-Married 6 year old

-Beheaded 600 Jews in one day

-Slave owner & dealer

-13 wives, 11 at one time

-Rapist

-Tortured & killed unbelievers

Interesting how the Tennessee muzzies knew the billboard was talking about their man Mohammed when he’s not even named, isn’t it?

The line is now drawn in the sand, Brothers and Sisters.

It’s time to be like Texas.

Please note that the following article and commentary is not intended to be used as financial advice. It is for entertainment and education purposes only.

How many Bitcoin are potentially available in the world? Anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject will tell you that 21 million is the limit.

This limit is the basis of its investing allure (now that drug traffickers have realised that it is traceable).

Until recent times, this was also the allure of gold and silver as investments. In short, they couldn’t be printed – at least, that is what people thought.

Then, the banks and financial institutions got involved and began printing promises to give people gold and silver at some point in the future.

These included instruments such as futures contracts, derivatives, unallocated accounts and so forth.

As far as I can tell, there are far more of these contracts to supply the underlying precious metals than there are precious metals to back them up.

That doesn’t matter, however, so long as not too many people try to convert those contracts into actual metal.

Lots of people and institutions have bought these contracts instead of buying the actual metal. In my opinion, this would mean that the price hasn’t risen as much as it would have if all that money went directly into the metals themselves.

Of course, selling ownership contracts to people for something that you don’t actually own should be highly illegal.

If you or I tried it we would be going straight to jail.

Fortunately for the banks running this scam, however, it suits the Government down to the ground.

That is because it supresses lending costs for them by putting downward pressure on bond yields and so they are happy for it to carry on ad infinitum.

The only thing that could end the party would be people fronting up with those contracts and asking for delivery of the goodies which would end the price suppression and make gold and silver investors very happy.

Well, now the same thing appears to be happening to Bitcoin as the following article explains:

THE PHANTOM SUPPLY PROBLEM: HOW WALL STREET’S DERIVATIVES MACHINE MAY BE QUIETLY DISMANTLING BITCOIN’S SCARCITY THESIS

by Corey Blackwell

Posted from Web Pro News
A growing number of analysts argue that Wall Street’s derivatives infrastructure has created effectively unlimited synthetic Bitcoin supply, undermining the 21 million hard cap thesis and shifting price discovery from on-chain markets to leveraged derivatives dominated by institutional players.

For more than a decade, Bitcoin’s investment case has rested on an elegant, almost poetic premise: there will only ever be 21 million coins.

That hard cap, enforced by immutable code, was supposed to make Bitcoin the world’s first truly scarce digital asset — a hedge against central bank money printing, a digital gold for the internet age.

But a provocative argument gaining traction among veteran crypto analysts suggests that this foundational thesis may have already been fatally compromised — not by a code change or a 51% attack, but by the very financial infrastructure that was supposed to legitimize Bitcoin and carry it into the mainstream.

The argument, laid out in stark terms by the widely followed crypto analyst 0xNobler on X, is straightforward and unsettling: the moment Wall Street built a derivatives superstructure on top of Bitcoin — cash-settled futures, perpetual swaps, options chains, ETFs, prime broker lending, wrapped BTC, and total return swaps — it effectively created a mechanism for manufacturing synthetic supply.

And when supply can be synthetically created at will, scarcity ceases to function as a price floor. “The moment supply can be synthetically created, scarcity is gone,” 0xNobler wrote. “And when scarcity is gone, price stops being discovered on-chain and starts being set in derivatives.”

A Structural Break That Has Historical Precedent
This is not an entirely novel observation. Commodity market veterans have long argued that the same structural dynamic hollowed out price discovery in gold, silver, and oil markets decades ago.

The London Bullion Market Association and COMEX futures markets trade multiples of the world’s actual physical gold supply on any given day.

The Bank for International Settlements has documented how notional derivatives volumes in commodity markets dwarf physical delivery many times over.

Critics of these markets, including the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA), have spent years arguing that paper gold suppresses the price of physical metal by creating an effectively unlimited synthetic float.

What 0xNobler and a growing chorus of Bitcoin-native analysts are now arguing is that the same playbook has been imported wholesale into crypto.

The mechanics are not complicated. A single physical Bitcoin sitting in a custodial vault — say, at Coinbase Custody, which serves as custodian for multiple spot Bitcoin ETFs — can simultaneously serve as the backing for an ETF share, collateral for a futures contract on the CME, the reference asset for a perpetual swap on an offshore exchange, the underlying for an options delta hedge, collateral for a prime broker loan, and the reference for a structured note sold to institutional clients.

“That’s six claims on one coin,” 0xNobler argued. “That is not a free market. That is a fractional-reserve price system wearing a Bitcoin mask.”

The Rise of the Synthetic Float and What It Means for Price Discovery
The concept at the center of this debate is what some analysts are calling the Synthetic Float Ratio, or SFR — the ratio of synthetic or paper Bitcoin exposure to actual on-chain supply.

While there is no single authoritative source for this metric, the data points that inform it are publicly available and sobering.

CME Bitcoin futures open interest alone has surged past $15 billion in recent months, according to data tracked by CoinGlass. Perpetual swap open interest across major exchanges adds tens of billions more.

The eleven U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs approved in January 2024 now collectively hold over 1.1 million BTC, according to reporting by CoinDesk. And that’s before accounting for the opaque world of over-the-counter prime brokerage, securities lending, and structured products that don’t show up in any public data feed.

When synthetic supply overwhelms real supply in any market, price behavior changes fundamentally. It stops responding primarily to organic demand — retail buyers, long-term holders accumulating, corporate treasury purchases — and starts being driven by positioning, hedging flows, and liquidation cascades.

This is the world Bitcoin now inhabits, according to this thesis. The massive liquidation events that have become a recurring feature of crypto markets — where billions of dollars in leveraged long positions are wiped out in hours, sending the price into a violent downward spiral — are not random.

They are the predictable consequence of a market where the dominant participants are not investors but dealers managing inventory and extracting value from leveraged speculators.

Wall Street’s Playbook: Manufacturing Inventory, Not Taking Risk
The strategy 0xNobler describes is familiar to anyone who has studied how market makers and proprietary trading desks operate in mature derivatives markets.

The process, as he outlines it, follows a repeatable cycle: create unlimited paper BTC through derivatives issuance, short into rallies to cap upside, force liquidations by pushing price through key leverage thresholds, cover short positions at lower prices, and repeat.

“This isn’t ‘betting,’” he wrote. “It’s inventory manufacturing.” The key insight is that the firms executing this strategy are not speculating on Bitcoin’s direction.

They are market-neutral — profiting from the spread between synthetic and physical, from funding rates on perpetual swaps, from the basis trade between spot and futures, and from the liquidation of over-leveraged retail and institutional traders.

The basis trade, in particular, has become one of the most crowded strategies in crypto. Hedge funds buy spot Bitcoin (or spot Bitcoin ETF shares) and simultaneously sell CME futures at a premium, capturing the spread as risk-free yield.

This trade has attracted billions in capital, according to analysis by Bloomberg, and has been cited as a major driver of ETF inflows — meaning that a significant portion of the record-breaking demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs may not represent directional bullish bets at all, but rather the long leg of a hedged arbitrage position.

When these trades unwind — as they inevitably do when the futures premium compresses or turns negative — the selling pressure hits both the futures and spot markets simultaneously.

The ETF Paradox: Institutional Adoption as a Trojan Horse
The irony is profound. For years, the Bitcoin community lobbied for spot ETF approval, arguing it would unlock trillions in institutional capital and drive prices dramatically higher.

And in the short term, the ETF launches did coincide with a powerful rally that took Bitcoin to new all-time highs above $73,000 in March 2024.

But the longer-term structural consequence may be something far more ambiguous. The ETFs have made Bitcoin vastly more accessible to institutional capital — but that capital comes with its own infrastructure, its own incentives, and its own playbook.

As The Financial Times has reported, the majority of institutional flows into Bitcoin ETFs have come from hedge funds and trading firms, not from the pension funds and endowments that the crypto industry hoped would provide a stable base of long-term holders.

This creates a feedback loop that structurally disadvantages the original Bitcoin holder. On-chain data from firms like Glassnode consistently shows that long-term holders — wallets that haven’t moved coins in over a year — continue to accumulate.

The so-called “diamond hands” are still holding. But their behavior is increasingly irrelevant to short-term price discovery, because the marginal price of Bitcoin is no longer set by on-chain transactions between willing buyers and sellers.

It is set in the derivatives markets, where synthetic supply can be created and destroyed at the speed of a trading algorithm.

Is the 21 Million Cap Still Meaningful?
This raises the most uncomfortable question of all for Bitcoin maximalists: if price discovery has migrated to derivatives markets where supply is effectively unlimited, does the 21 million hard cap still matter?

The answer, according to the bearish structural thesis, is that it matters on-chain — but on-chain is no longer where the price is determined.

The analogy to gold is instructive. There are approximately 212,000 metric tons of gold above ground, according to the World Gold Council.

That supply is finite and grows slowly. Yet the gold price has been subject to decades of alleged suppression through paper markets, and the disconnect between physical scarcity and paper abundance has been a source of endless frustration for gold bugs.

Bitcoin bulls counter that the analogy is imperfect. Unlike gold, Bitcoin can be self-custodied and verified on-chain, and a sufficiently large movement of coins to self-custody could drain exchange reserves and force a short squeeze of historic proportions.

This is the “bank run” thesis — the idea that if enough holders withdraw their coins from exchanges and custodians, the fractional-reserve system collapses and price must reprice dramatically higher to reflect actual scarcity.

On-chain analytics from CryptoQuant show that exchange reserves have been declining steadily, suggesting this dynamic is already in motion, albeit slowly.

The Battle Between Code and Capital
What we are witnessing, then, is a fundamental tension between Bitcoin’s protocol-level scarcity and the financial system’s ability to manufacture synthetic exposure to that scarcity.

It is a battle between code and capital, between the cypherpunk ethos of trustless, permissionless money and the Wall Street imperative to financialize, leverage, and extract.

The outcome is not predetermined. If the derivatives superstructure continues to grow relative to on-chain activity, Bitcoin’s price may increasingly behave like any other institutionally dominated asset — subject to the same cycles of leverage, liquidation, and manipulation that characterize traditional commodity markets.

But if the Bitcoin community’s instinct toward self-custody, on-chain verification, and skepticism of intermediaries proves durable, there is a countervailing force that could eventually reassert the primacy of real scarcity over synthetic supply.

The next few years will likely determine which force prevails. As 0xNobler warned his followers: “Ignore it if you want, but don’t pretend you weren’t warned.”

Whether one views this as alarmism or prescience, the structural argument deserves serious engagement from anyone with meaningful exposure to Bitcoin.

The asset’s price may ultimately be determined not by how many coins exist, but by how many claims on those coins the financial system is allowed to create.

Our developers have reconstituted the site on a slightly different URL. It is now

https://richardsonpost.com.au/

Hopefully all is working as before. Those of you who stuck with us on Substack have been able to stay in the loop so thanks for that.

We will try to recapture our .com domain and divert that to here which looks like it is where we will live from now on.

Please bear with us. We’re doing our best.

Harry