Cluster of ram raids involving robbery & arson in Northern Rivers region sees NSW Police establishing Strike Force Albany to investigate the incidents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udQ2FnU1pfE 

ECHO, 15 November 2024:

Financial Crime Squad detectives have released CCTV as they appeal for information following the ram raid and arson of two tobacconists at Tweed and Ballina.....

There was also a fire at the Ocean Shores [Byron Shire] tobacconist at about 12.45am on Tuesday, 6 August though police have not claimed any link between the Ballina and Tweed ram raids and fire and the one at Ocean Shores.

Full article at https://www.echo.net.au/2024/11/appeal-over-arson-and-ram-raid-of-tobacconists-at-tweed-and-ballina/

9 News, 15 November 2024:

Police have set their sights on the booming illegal tobacco trade after recent attacks on tobacconists prompted fears violent turf wars are spilling into NSW.....

9 News, 7 November 2024:

There have been more than 1000 offences recorded in Goondiwindi [Qld] in the past year alone.

Its location on the edge of NSW makes it a tough one for police to track down perpetrators.

Taskforce Guardian – which has seen NSW and Queensland police join forces – stepped in to tackle the spike in robberies and break-ins in a three-day cross-border crackdown.

"I will say to these offenders, if you target these locations we will identify you and we will use our intelligence skills and we will use our counterparts in Queensland to arrest you," NSW Police's Andrew Holland told 9News.

9News was invited to see inside the task force, which involved Queensland and NSW police officers teaming up to hunt down the alleged criminals.....

NSW Police News, 15 November 2024:

Detectives release CCTV appeal following ram raids and arsons of Northern NSW tobacconists

Financial Crime Squad detectives have released CCTV as they appeal for information following the ram raid and arson of two tobacconists in Northern NSW.

About 4.30am on Sunday 22 September 2024, police were called to a tobacconist on Minjungbal Drive, Tweed Heads South, following reports of a crash.

Officers attached to Tweed/Byron Police District arrived to find a Toyota Corolla sedan, believed to have been stolen from Queensland, driven into a tobacconist, before two unknown males entered the business destroying several displays and stealing large amounts of cigarettes.

A crime scene was established, and police commenced an investigation into the incident.

A month later, about 2.40am on Tuesday 22 October, police were called to the same tobacconist, following reports a car had driven into a neighbouring business.

Police arrived to find a MG SUV had driven into the store – as bollards had been placed in front of the tobacconist – before two unknown men poured fuel inside the business and fled without setting it alight.

A crime scene was established, and police commenced an investigation into the incident.

About 3.30am the next day (Wednesday 23 October 2024), emergency services were called to River Street in Ballina, following reports of a building fire.

On arrival, officers attached to Richmond Police District located a silver Mercedes sedan inside the shopfront of a tobacconist, well alight.

Police were told the sedan drove into the business before the vehicle caught fire, with the occupants of the vehicle leaving the scene prior to police arrival.

Fire and Rescue NSW attended and extinguished the blaze; however, the building was extensively damaged.

Surrounding units were evacuated and two other vehicles were damaged by the blaze.

No injuries have been reported as a result of the incident.

A crime scene has been established and an investigation into the incident has commenced.

Following initial investigations linking all three incidents, detectives attached to State Crime Command’s Financial Crime Squad’s Arson Unit commenced Strike Force Albany to investigate the incidents.

As part of investigations, strike force detectives have released CCTV of the two ram raids at the Tweed Heads South tobacconist.

Detectives are also hoping to speak to the driver and passengers of a dark coloured sedan seen leaving the scene of the second ram raid.

Anyone with information about any of the incidents are urged to contact police or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

Anyone with information that may assist investigators is urged to contact Crime Stoppers: 1800 333 000 or https://nsw.crimestoppers.com.au. Information is treated in strict confidence. The public is reminded not to report information via NSW Police social media pages.

According to NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) over the last financial year ending June 2024 the incidence rate per 100,000 population of robbery using a weapon other than a firearm in the Tweed and Ballina local government areas was 10.2 and 4.3 respectively. Compared to a state incidence rate of 9.3.

While the incidence rate of arson generally was 43.9 in Tweed, 44.8 in Ballina and 43.8 in Byron shires. Compared to a state incidence rate of 56.1.

Cartoon for the times in which we live

 

On 14 November 2024 The Guardian announced it will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts.

Stating the X social media platform’s coverage of US election crystallised longstanding concerns about its content. 

This was the cartoon setting out the future as imagined by First Dog.....

Leaving Twitter? Here are some alternatives to checking an online Nazi bot sewer every 20 minutes

First Dog on the Moon

Social media

Fri 15 Nov 2024 17.11 AEDT

Illustration: First Dog on the Moon/The Guardian

Click on images to enlarge

North Coast Voices won't be posting again until Saturday 16 November 2025

Apologies to regular readers and browsers.

Need to give my eyes a rest away from digital 

screens for a few days.

GODWIN'S FIRST & SECOND LAWS OF THE INTERNET: in which a politician in America and another in Australia are measured against these adage 'yardsticks' *WARNING: contains offensive language*

 

GODWIN'S FIRST LAW

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

GODWIN'S SECOND LAW

"Drawing Bayesian inferences after extensive sampling, I’ve determined that it’s 99-percent certain that anyone who uses “woke” as pejorative will turn out to be a fuckhead. Please don’t blame me for pointing this out–it’s just science."

Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme.

This year it seems that political discourse has really dived into the sewer in Australia and elsewhere around the world with those two observations by Mike Goodwin that became Internet adages receiving a mention as the hate is noticed and discussed.

Under Godwin's First Law a Hitler analogy may  now be considered applicable to Donald J. Trump in any considered argument, rather than being just a hyperbolic comparison........

The Washington Post, 24 September 2024, p.19:

There's a semisatirical theorem, known as Godwin's Law, which posits that if any online discourse goes on long enough, it inevitably leads to a Hitler or Nazi comparison. No professional pundit wants to be guilty of tripping this law.

After all, equating a political figure with fascists sounds absurd. It's just so over the top. It also might not win over any additional allies; people roll their eyes and tune out when they hear commentators or historians warn, yet again, about another big bad Great Dictator.

Problem is, Donald Trump seems intent on making the Hitler comparison happen....

Even Godwin Law's namesake, Mike Godwin, wrote in a Post op-ed last year that he agrees the Hitler analogy is not just apt but necessary. He cited Trump's authoritarian instincts for consolidating state power in a single leader; dehumanizing political enemies as "vermin"; and claiming that immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country," an infamous Hitler talking point.

"Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy," Godwin wrote in December.

And in fact, neither Godwin nor I is anywhere close to being the first to compare Trump with 20th-century fascists. Both of us were beaten out by Vance himself, who in 2016 referred to Trump as "America's Hitler."

The Washington Post online, 20 December 2023:

What's arguably worse than Trump's frank authoritarianism is his embrace of dehumanizing tropes that seem to echo Hitler's rhetoric deliberately. For many weeks now, Trump has been road-testing his use of the word "vermin" to describe those who oppose him and to characterize undocumented immigrants as "poisoning the blood of our country." Even for an amateur historian like me, the parallels to Hitler's rhetoric seem inescapable....

The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin's Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump's express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.

While Godwin's Second Law, which posits that using the word "woke" as a pejorative is an indication of fuckheadedness, is being tested on social media.....

United Australia Party Senator for Victoria Ralph Babet, elected at the May 2022 Australian federal general election.

The woke left is harming children.

Join The Movement - https://t.co/4pOujssPP5 pic.twitter.com/918JCwHb7O

— Senator Babet (@senatorbabet) October 20, 2024

 

The good news for Australia after the 2024 US presidential & general election: It is highly unlikely at this stage that many American are considering moving to another country to avoid a second Trump Administration and if they did it's probable that Australia wouldn't be their first choice

Internet searches are fickle things. Results very much depend on the search engine employed, exact key words or phrases used, timespan chosen and whether AI has decided to mess with the search results. 

So looking at Internet searches using Google Chrome without AI from 12pm on Sunday, 3 November 2024 in Sydney Australia (8pm Saturday, 2 November in Washington DC) to 12pm on Sunday, 10 November 2024 (8pm Saturday, 9 November in DC), the Google Trends graph below indicates a point when at least a few people in the US began to feel uncomfortable with the new political landscape developing before their eyes.

That point was at 5pm on Tuesday, 5 November on the US west coast and 7pm on the east coast.

Click on graphs to enlarge

 

So despite some U.S. talk show hosts and a few YouTube accounts talking about the level of fear and/or 'buyer remorse' developing among the population at the looming prospect of a second Trump Administration, it seems that like Scarlett O'Hara on the big screen and the peoples of Europe in the late 1930s the majority of Americans will 'think about it tomorrow'.

US president-elect Donald J Trump announces the following based on "Project 2025: presidential transition project" hard right political playbook

On 8 November 2024 US president-elect and convicted fraudster, 78 year-old Donald John Trump made the following announcement ushering in an authoritarian state, headed by a president intent on revenge against those he perceives as his enemies and retribution for a long list of delusional grievances.

 

Donald Trump has just released his plan to "demolish the deep state."

Unglued Project 2025 stuff.

Buckle up, folks. pic.twitter.com/AniimjUcbG

— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) November 8, 2024

 The Heritage Foundation and the Project 2025 Advisory Board - along with Donald Trump himself - have repeatedly denied any association with each other. Unfortunately these denials have proved to be untruths.

Project 2025 922-page 180-Day Playbook at

https://www.project2025.org/playbook/ 

and

https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf   

Australia's initial reaction to Trump's election win is a mixture of caution and dread....

Financial Review, 7 November 2024:

President-elect Donald Trump will likely be a unilateralist in his dealings with Australia and the rest of the world, neither a pre-World War Two isolationist nor the post-war global policeman.

Trump’s highly transactional view of life means he will take America in and out of world affairs as and when it suits his mercurial personality. He will approach each international relationship through the prism of what is in it for him. For Trump, the geopolitical is personal.....

The immediate risk for Australia is Trump’s flagship policy of tariffs on imports, which threaten a 60 per cent charge on Chinese goods and up to 20 per cent on all others. Robert Lighthizer, his hawkish former trade representative who is tipped to return to the new administration, doesn’t believe that free trade works. He argues that America did not lose its microchip industry because of a lack of comparative advantage, but because of the subsidies and industry policies of other countries. He also thinks it has been China’s choice not to open more of its domestic market to better balance its trade with the US.

Australia is a small open economy highly exposed to the ripple effects of an all-out US-China trade war. ANU economist Warwick McKibbin says that because China takes a massive 47 per cent of Australia’s goods exports, the collateral damage to Australia from a Sino-US tariff fight could mean a hit on the economy of 0.3 per cent of GDP a year by 2035. In America, the proposed tariffs would rekindle inflation, forcing up interest rates and the cost of funding immense US debts. That will keep upward pressure on global interest rates too, making it harder for the Reserve Bank to cut rates here. On the other hand, China may have kept fiscal stimulus plans in reserve for a Trump trade clash, from which Australia would gain.

Australia will watch closely how Trump treats wider US alliances in the Pacific.

The mutual harm of a trade war might pave the way to negotiating instead. Trump might be content to use the threat of tariffs to push for concessions from trade partners. And if tariffs were to be implemented, the heavy cost to US consumers and the damage to US exporters hit by retaliatory tariffs could see Congress itself water them down to more selective targeting. Australia could blunt some of the impact of any tariff changes by successfully negotiating reductions as it did for steel and aluminium exports during the first Trump administration.

Australia will watch closely how Trump treats wider US alliances in the Pacific, the so-called “lattice work” of partnerships built up by the Biden administration connecting Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, India, and Australia.

Trump has a much more insular vision of American power, viewing long-term commitments to international alliances as liabilities the US could do without. Yet if he leaves a strategic vacuum by quitting the region then China, Russia and others would move fast to fill it. And it would not be long before even a more self-contained Trump America began feeling the pressure of an expanding China. Trump would find that turning his back on allies was a more costly transaction than he thought.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 November 2024:

Donald Trump’s policy agenda could precipitate a global financial crisis and fuel inflation, one of the world’s leading analysts has warned, with fears Australians will suffer higher interest rates and a $36 billion hit to the domestic economy.

As the Reserve Bank conceded the incoming US president’s debt-fuelled policies would put upward pressure on global interest rates, former bank board member Warwick McKibbin likened the impact of Trump’s plans on Australia to being in the middle of a line of fireworks as they exploded on New Year’s Eve.

Trump’s plans also pose enormous political problems for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Liberal leader Peter Dutton in the lead-up to next year’s election, with analysis suggesting even winning some concessions from the Trump administration would not prevent ongoing turmoil for Australia.

Interest rates globally have climbed since Trump’s victory over US Vice President Kamala Harris, fuelled by expectations his plans for tax cuts, tariffs and the deportation of millions of undocumented workers will increase the size of American government debt.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an independent US organisation, estimates the Trump agenda would increase debt by $US7.8 trillion ($12 trillion) by 2035, taking it to an unprecedented 143 per cent of GDP.

Following Wednesday’s election results, the Australian dollar – among many currencies – lost value against the US dollar as investors bet a further lift in American government debt would require higher interest rates.

More speculative investments such as cryptocurrencies also enjoyed a surge in support. The price of bitcoin lifted from $104,500 early on Wednesday to a record high of $116,000 in the 21 hours after Trump’s re-election became clear.

Giving evidence to a Senate hearing in Canberra, Reserve Bank assistant governor Christopher Kent said Trump’s policies such as tax cuts would probably mean higher US long-term interest rates and inflation, which would flow through to the global economy.

“Because the US is such an important source of funding, and the demand by the government for borrowing is substantial, that’ll have upward effects on global interest rates,” he said.

Kent said Trump’s protectionist tariff policies would slow growth around the world.....

McKibbin said Trump’s tariff plan, which includes imposts of 10 to 20 per cent on Australian goods and 60 per cent on those from China, would directly hit the local economy while undermining global trade.

But the broader elements of Trump’s agenda, especially possible interference in the setting of American interest rates, could deliver the world another financial crisis.

“It’s like standing on Sydney Harbour Bridge when they set off the fireworks – you don’t want to be on it. There are fuses everywhere and they are just going to ignite,” McKibbin said.

Nationwide News, 7 October 2024:

The Reserve Bank claims there could be an “adverse effect” on Australia if incoming US President Donald Trump were to impose tariffs of up to 60 per cent on China.

During senate estimates on Wednesday, RBA assistant governor Christopher Kent said it was a “big concern“ whether Mr Trump follows through on the levies of Chinese-made goods, but added the full-effect was still unclear.

The levies would be higher than the 7.5 to 25 per cent implemented during his first time.

They are considered part of a broader suite of measures to boost the US economy, which also includes broad tariff increases on all imports of up to 10 per cent, cutting taxes, slashing immigration, and deregulation.

“The big concern is large tariffs on China, which may have an adverse effect on us,” he said.

“So is it right to characterise the RBA position as of this morning as unclear in terms of what the United States election outcome means for inflation outlooks.”

Speaking more broadly, he said Mr Trump’s promised tariffs would likely ”push up” the US dollar and create less demand by the US for goods produced in other markets.

“But it means less demand by the US for global goods, so that’s sort of a negative for growth elsewhere,” he said.....

UPDATE

Trump with the bit between his teeth on 15 December 2022.....

DEVELOPING: 🚨 President-Elect Donald Trump Outlines Plan to “Shatter” Censorship Regime, Restore Free Speech 🚨

President-Elect Donald Trump has released a comprehensive strategy to dismantle what he calls the "left-wing censorship regime," promising swift action on his first… pic.twitter.com/fjwJViKabz

— MiddleMaga.com (@StucknDaMid) November 8, 2024