A. West in The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism (2023), has developed in detail an argument that has later been made by Elon Musk, that climate change catastrophism is really a death cult. The death part is easy to establish, since that narrative is by definition, concerned with the doom of human civilisation unless radical measures are taken such as the replacement of fossil fuels and meat eating. But the cult or religious part requires more conceptual and empirical work, which is supplied by West in his book, summarised below. He goes into detail about survey data indicating direct links between climate alarmism and religious cults. But, there is a simpler approach.

My approach is more qualitative. I would maintain that the core elements of cults are blind devotion to the central tenants of the cult, the beliefs that define it, even to the point of committing acts of violence. This we see with climate change alarmism. But as well, as with any cult worth its poison Kool Aid, there is a doomsday belief, that the world is heading to disaster unless people start believing in the cult. Climate change alarmism fits this paradigm perfectly, and in this regard, Elon Musk was dead on the money.

Michael Snyder has written about the abortion dilemma for American politics, that politicians taking strong pro-life stance, tend to lose. Even though over 60 million babies have been slaughtered in the United States since 1973, opinion poll after opinion poll has shown majority support for abortion. After the over-turning of Roe v Wade, the number of abortions went up. And in state elections, pro-life candidates have lost: “We won, the states voted— and voted and voted and voted — and we lost. Every time. It turns out (no matter what they tell pollsters or their neighbors) the people LOVE abortion. They want no restrictions. None. Not the tiniest little imposition. Montana voters rejected a law that would have merely require life-saving treatment be given to babies accidentally born alive during an abortion. That lost, 53% to 47%.”

In Australia, the abortion issue is not part of public angst like in America. Opinion polls allegedly show that 76 percent of Australians support abortion: https://www.ipsos.com/en-au/majority-australians-report-unwavering-support-abortion-access. Abortion is the big issue for the uber-liberal paradigm of human rightism, and it is the system’s answer to a promiscuous anti-Christian society. There is no strong political movement here to oppose this.

A controversy has erupted when a shareholder of the Commonwealth Bank has written to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission regarding a donation to the Yes side of the Voice campaign of $ 2 million. At the annual general meeting, he asked the Commonwealth Bank chair, to name the “relevant section of Corporations Act that authorises the Board to make a political donation to the Voice's YES campaign.” There was no reply to this, as the angry shareholder’s microphone was cut!

Hopefully the matter will be pursued and the ASIC rules that there is no relevant section of the Act allowing the donation. Then, there is a precedence for other shareholders to go after other corporates who did the same thing. Next woke adventure they may all be a bit more cautious, before getting into woke over-load.

Here is more depressing information on the housing/rental crisis in Australia. First, the latest Finder research has indicated that for Australians to buy a home they will need double the average full-time salary. The minimum household income required to front the mortgage for the average Australian house is $182,000, and those owning units need about $130,000. However, the average full-time salary is around $96,000 and not all of that can be spent on a mortgage, and there is a massive cost of living problem tossed in.

Second, there is the interest rate rise, so for example, borrowers with a $590,000 mortgage will be paying an extra $1345 a month compared to last year. This alone is crushing many families.

A UK High Court case is in progress over the adverse effects of the AstraZeneca Covid vax. The plaintiff IT engineer Jamie Scott suffered a brain haemorrhage the day after his first AstraZeneca jab, leaving him with permanent brain damage. He is partially blind. The case alleges that the dose was ineffective and claims of its efficacy “vastly overstated.”

The Daily Mail coverage is careful to push the line that the vax saved six million lives according to unnamed studies. But that claim is under debate as an exaggeration, since the mortality rate for Covid-19 is less than one percent for people who are not aged and/or immune-suppressed. And, it begs the question against the very item under discussion, namely the High Court case where this matter will need to be debated. The Covid vaxxes did not stop transmission of the Covid-19 virus, and nor did it prevent subsequent Covid infections.

Gatestone Institute.org has an excellent critique of the electric vehicle (EV) mania, from a US perceptive, but the material and arguments are relevant too for Australians, who in any case will be getting these electric monstrosities from overseas, particularly communist China. Vast sums of money are being invested for no good reason beyond the climate change alarmist view that fossil fuels are set to destroy the planet via runaway global warming. And the nation to benefit most from this fear campaign is communist China.

But still, consumer reality is biting, and both Ford and GM have faced problems unloading EVs on the public, who have gone quite sour on these woke vehicles. For example, Ford lost US $32,000 on every EV it sold in 2023. It is predicted that Ford will lose in 2023, US $ 4.5 billion on its EV products. Things are bad for GM too, as EV losses cut quarterly profits by US $ 1.5 billion. These are high, unsustainable losses, indicating market failure; that in general people are not interested in EVs

Pauline Hanson was set to deliver a speech to the Senate criticising the Welcome to Country propaganda. But, as she had also attacked the Greens for their apologist stance towards Islamic terrorism, she had her right to speak in the chamber temporarily revoked. But her colleague Malcolm Roberts was here to carry the charge on. The great speech is reproduced below.

https://twitter.com/PaulineHansonOz/status/1722407627081351181

Here are the contents of an email Jacqui Lambie sent me, deconstructing the PM’s great China visit, 50 years after Gough went to see Chairman Mao. She has got a re-election fund going, and does good work and is worth supporting.

Christians and most conservatives know this well, but contrary to liberal feminism, human embryos are not “blobs” of cells. The “blobs” idea has been promoted recently as the latest devaluing exercise in favour of abortion, to remove, seemingly, the logical sting that comes from the slaughter of a being with mortal value. Of course, also profiting from abortion is the medical industry, which benefits from foetal cells for lab experiments. The use of embryonic stem cells (ESC) is a notable example.

So, the “blob” idea has its economic background as well. As noted below in an article from Lifenews.com, little benefit has come from ESC research, and much cost: “What does it gain us if we trade the humanity of our fellows for the promise of future medical benefits? Ethical principles are often blunted when a cold utilitarian calculus takes priority over recognizing and respecting this humanity. Slavery, abortion and unethical human experimentation are all enabled by these propagandistic efforts at dehumanization.” 

It seems that mainstream journalists will stoop as low as they can go for a sensational story or photo shoot. Photo journalists were part of the Hamas forces who launched the October 7, 2023 attacks upon Israel. Major news organisations used their material. So, these photo journalists would necessarily have had prior knowledge of the attacks, but stood by recording the slaughter. It puts news in a whole new light where the recorders become part of the act, creating the events. Weird times indeed.     

Here is a human-interest story, but one with as wider moral, regarding the so-called renewable energy mania. A homesteader wanted to live off grid on a farm on the coast in Victoria. Privatisation of the power grid led to an insecure power supply, so the family decided to go fully off grid. They detail their journey in the extract below, but the relevant point is that the family while having a top-class solar and wind system, still found that they needed backup fossil-fuelled generators for overcast days with no wind. And, as is seldom mentioned by renewable energy advocates, the components of the renewable energy systems, frequently break down and in any case have to be replaced in 10-25 years. It is concluded as a lesson for the wider society:

“Extrapolating from our renewable energy experience, anyone who thinks that a modern society can function with a power grid that runs on just solar and wind power without fossil fuel or nuclear backup that’s able to immediately provide up to 100% of power needs on cloudy, still days and dark, windless nights, is totally deluded! 

Here is something that Aussies should consider, an issue which has arisen here in the UK regarding wind turbines, at least offshore wind farms. It has been found that the wind turbine blades interfere with radar signals. UK fighter pilots knew this for some time and would in training exercises fly into wind farm areas knowing that the blades’ rotation would interfere with radar detection.

Now the UK air force is seeing a problem here with the growing number of these wind farms, as Russian ships had been observed mapping communication and power cables in the North Sea earlier this year. It is likely that the growth of offshore wind farms is set to be a security threat.

Joanna Nova, who has done great work exposing the climate change scam, recently drew our attention to the elephant in the room of the net zero mania. The Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC) has urged the Albo government to get a moving on with its emission reduction schemes. The group is not purely Australian, as it has USD $30 trillion in assets, while the aggregate GDP of both Australia and New Zealand is only USD $2 trillion. So, this group represents the globalists, with Vanguard and BlackRock making up over 50 percent of the share.

As Jo sees it, this is a gigantic scam which has some sort of climate concern only as a cover: “Are the foreign bankers using the threat of withdrawing investments in order to bully more subsidies out of patsy Australian taxpayers and hapless Australian electricity consumers? They could feed the “profits” back to their own retirement funds overseas, while they boost wind and solar manufacturers in China, say, to get more favours with President Xi — the possibilities are endless. One arm of a supergiant fund can rake in the money created through predatory behaviour in another arm.” Yes, that is exactly the agenda here.

Left-wing Salon recently published an article claiming that Trump MAGA supporters and Christian nationalists pose a greater threat to America than Hamas. This is little more than a continuation of the attack that the Biden regime has launched upon its opposition via Trump. The article says: "The MAGA movement, backed by a swath of Christian nationalists, has been increasingly associated with violent incidents." However, there have been isolated violent incidences from both sides of politics in America, and the events of the antifa riots of 2020, with deaths, injuries, assaults and arson far outweigh anything done by MAGA types and Christian nationalists. Even the FBI see these groups as predominantly law-obeying. But the ideological narrative is to vilify these groups so that iron-fisted Leftist forces can be used against them to crush them.

I do not think this is going to work out as fine as the Leftist tyrants think. A similar strategy was used in the Voice referendum in Australia, to portray the No side as racists. But it failed miserably, as the Australia people are sick of such libels. And, so are we.

Just Stop Oil is just up to its old attention-seeking tricks. It is like happenings from the 1960s, only much darker, and sinister. Blocking roads so that ambulances could not get dying people to emergency medical attention, wrecking private property with spray paint, and attempting to damage art works.

The latest tricks are to disrupt theatre performances, as was recently done in London’s West End. These protests cost tax payers millions. And the protesters, university Leftist types, seem to not be concerned abut legal fees. The reason? It is rumoured that the costs of their adventures are being paid for by a billionaire, not George Soros in this instance. It is hard to get concrete facts on this, so I will not drop the rumoured name. Yet it would seem as good strategy for the authorities having to deal with this civil disobedience to investigate the financiers of this, and see if there is a legal route to closing them down. The same applies to many antifa protests which seem linked to another globalist big money figure.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has said that China is planning to build humanoid smart robots which will "reshape the world." "They are expected to become disruptive products after computers, smartphones, and new energy vehicles." US companies are also at work on this, to create walking robots that will be able to replace humans in manual labour jobs. However, the Chinese are the most ambitious here saying the robots will be up and walking by 2025. While that may be too optimistic, the writing is clearly on the wall of more job elimination, perhaps greater than ever anticipated. 

Musk sees this as a good thing, which will free up people for leisure. That would be a good thing in principle if we had a Douglas social credit economy, but without that people are going to be simply abandoned by corporate capitalism, just as the Aussies now who are made homeless from the Asian-migration fuelled rental crisis, are being abandoned by the heartless political class. It is difficult to see what can be done here by us, using classical grassroots principles, since communist China will do what it wants. That will create an inevitable AI arms race. Consequently, we must evolve strategies to survive the short-term, and wait out this storm of madness.

Agenda 2030, based upon a grab-bag of so-called “sustainable development” goals, is a form of strong technocracy, the idea that society needs to be run by those who are elites in science and technology, applying so-called scientific principles to social policy.

Technocracy was given a very public face during the Covid plandemic, where medical authorities dictated public health policies, under the watchful eyes of Big Pharma. There we saw the implications of what a society run by technocrats looked like, as fundamental liberal principles were abandoned in favour of social control and paternalism, as “we are doctors, and we know.” It was not just the higher-level members of the health profession pushing his arrogance, but it came down to the local GP as well, most of whom not only go along for the ride, under the threat of deregistration, but are enthusiastic endorsers of medical technocracy.

There has been considerable interest among conservatives following the inaugural meeting in London of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. The aim of this organisation is to counter the globalism of the World Economic Forum, through a network that will defend nationalism and traditional institutions such as the family. They are definitely opposed to bans on fossil fuels and the dictates of the elites that we eat bugs, and that is a great thing in itself! And one spin-off from the ARC meeting is the question of how to preserve, or indeed, create intellectual diversity of thought in organisations such as the ABC, and especially the universities.

This is a topic which we have been discussing here for years. The answer is, as I see it, that it is at present hopeless and a waste of time to try to reform these organisations. Instead, as US conservative intellectual Dr Steve Turley argues in his YouTube programs, we need to build parallel organisations to slowly replace the decaying woke conventional entities. This is exactly what the purpose of ARC is, and a point missed by the commentary (below) from The Australian.

There has been an explosion of controversy here in the UK in the wake of Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s comments that homelessness is a “lifestyle choice.” Homeless charities, such as Crisis, Centrepoint, St Mungo’s and Pathway, strongly criticised the comments that were made on X, and in a letter said: “Sleeping on the street is not a lifestyle choice. Laying blame with people forced to sleep rough will only push people further away from help into poverty, putting them at risk of exploitation. At the extreme end, we will see an increase in deaths and fatalities, which are totally preventable.

“People sleeping rough frequently experience violence and abuse. The impact on their physical and mental health is significant. The average age of death for people experiencing homelessness is just 45 for men and 43 for women. This is not a life people choose.”

The World Health Organization is impatient regarding its International Health Regulations (IHR), including the Pandemic Treaty, planned to be pushed through during the next World Health Assembly (WHA) in May 2024, so that the new IHR will effective without a vote. At the last secret WHO meeting where this was plotted, the public media not being privy to the closed-door meeting, it is rumoured via leaks, that some countries abstained from voting, while other such as Russia, objected. However, without worldwide resistance the treaty will be rammed through without a vote. It will hand over health control of nations to the WHO and UN, who have revised the definition of “health” to define it so broadly that all aspects of society now fall under this concept. That alone will give them world dictatorship powers. For example, the environment and food production are part of health now.