⏱️This edition of the National Account’s newsletter is a six-minute read.

👋 G’day everyone, Archie here.

I hope you didn’t miss me too much while I was away moving house. It’s probably one of the worst ways to spend a free day, alongside getting a tooth pulled and cleaning up after a house party.

ANYWAY…

I’ve got three stories for you today.

First, the collapse of the Nugan Hand Bank. Was this financial institution secretly a front for the CIA to traffic drug money? And how did one of the men responsible flee the country?

Then, the Queensland Premier reckons data centres, notorious for their high levels of power consumption, are going to push power prices down. I take a look at how that doesn’t really make sense.

Finally, how memes can be used to manipulate you.

Let’s get into it 🗞️

❝

Bloody scumbags… I lost the lot.

Rex McGowan, who invested $40,000 with the Nugan Hand Bank three days before its collapse in 1980 - 60 Minutes

🗣️ Why did he say that?

In 1980, the founder of Nugan Hand Bank was found dead in his car with a bullet in his head near Lithgow NSW. In the wreckage was the business card of a former CIA director.

The discovery kicked off a scandal involving alleged drug money, arms deals, and a co-founder who vanished for 35 years, before being tracked down living under a new name in the United States.

For my full rundown check out today’s video:

Make it make sense 🤠

Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has signed a lease at a Queensland data centre project that at full capacity could use as much power as 1.5 million homes.

But at the beginning of the month, Queensland Premier David Crisafulli was pitching data centres as a way to drive down power prices, which just doesn’t quite make sense.

Watch my rundown below:

Finally: how memes can be weaponised against you 😂

Memetic warfare uses memes and targeted content to influence the public.

And the last decade has seen this form of warfare both discreetly, with Russian influence campaigns using fake accounts, and more explicitly, like the Iranian government's Lego city memes.

These influence campaigns raise a question back home: is Australia vulnerable to a memetic influence campaign?

Thanks for catching up with me. I hope you enjoyed this issue, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Just reply to this email and I’ll be on the other side 👋

I’ll be back on Friday.

Cheers, Archie

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