ByDuggan Flanakin ~

Politics makes strange bedfellows and even stranger divorces. Take the Chinese boycott of Australian coal, which began about a year ago. China is upset over Australia’s assertions that China was at fault for the COVID-19 pandemic and egregious human rights violations. [China in response accused the U.S., Australia, and NATO of human rights violations in Afghanistan.]

A year later, Australia is getting record high prices for its coal, while China is suffering through shortages of its primary fuel for electric power generation. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the market price for Australian metallurgical coal has risen from about $US100 per metric ton to $US220 per ton, while Chinese steel mills, barred from buying Australian coal, are paying up to $US440 per ton for lower grade metallurgical coal from other nations.

Business columnist Stephen Bartholomeusz explains that Australian coal producers found new buyers in Japan…

By Tim Graham ~

In the last few years, Facebook has become Public Enemy #1 in the media’s imagination, and Mark Zuckerberg is suddenly the creepy James Bond villain. Celebrated PBS filmmaker Ken Burns even ranted on a podcast that Zuckerberg was an “enemy of the state” who should be in jail.

After Facebook went down for six hours on October 4, CBS late-night “comedian” Stephen Colbert joked “Facebook did not say what might be causing the outage. Now, I’m no computer expert, but my theory is: A just God?”

It does not matter one iota that Facebook employees donated 90 percent of their political money to the Democrats in the last cycle. Or that Zuckerberg donated $400 million to a “civic integrity” group that funded election monitors and health measures at the polls in 2020. It doesn’t matter how many Facebook posts they censored to please the Left before…

By Paul Driessen ~

Book reviews usually tell people, buy this new hardback. This article advises, don’t bother reading Silent Earth, much less purchasing a copy; it’s mostly a junk-science, anti-technology screed.

Dave Goulson’s book expands on Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s polemic against pesticides that helped rid Europe and the USA of deadly malaria, and now protect crops that require so much land, water, work, fertilizer and energy to grow and harvest that we dare not sacrifice them to hordes of hungry insects.

Carson falsely blamed DDT for her cancer – and launched the practice of using conjecture, poetic prose, hyperbole and even fraud, instead of evidence-based science, to advance environmentalist agendas. The Environmental Defense Fund used her book to drive its campaign to ban DDT and give environmentalists “a level of authority they never had before.”

The EPA ban led to the deaths of millions of…

By Jarrett Stepman ~

Is Australia turning authoritarian?

As COVID-19 cases in Australia increased over the past few months due to the delta variant, we’ve seen images of mass protests alongside police and military crackdowns.

The Australian military has been unleashed in Sydney to enforce draconian lockdowns and extreme restrictions on travel. Officials often have unevenly and arbitrarily enforced these restrictions.

More Australians embrace a view of collective security in which rights are simply grants of privilege by state authorities. Pictured: Police tackle a protester Sept. 25 at St. Kilda in Melbourne, Australia, during a rally protesting COVID-19 lockdowns. (Photo: William West/AFP/Getty Images)

John Fund at National Review laid out how absurd things have become Down Under.

“In Victoria, Premier Dan Andrews has promised to ‘lock out’ the unvaccinated from the economy, while New South Wales has made the shot mandatory for public-sector workers,” Fund wrote. “But politicians are…

By Anthony B Kim ~

In his recent commentary titled “Reimagining A More Resilient UN System With Taiwan In It,” Taiwan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jaushieh Joseph Wu presented a case for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the global body.

Wu said, “Taiwan’s effective response to the pandemic, its rapid capacity expansion to meet global supply chain demand, and its substantive assistance toward partner countries around the world all stand as compelling reasons for Taiwan to play a constructive role in the [United Nations] system.”

Taiwan and the U.S. have become strong partners that share powerful commitments to the values of democracy, the rule of law, and free markets. Pictured: Taipei 101 is the 11th-tallest building in the world and the tallest in Taiwan. (Photo: kecl/Getty Images)

Indeed, from a broader foreign policy perspective, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shows why the United States should be in the business of…

Reposted from XYZ.net.au

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard has signed off on a public health order which appears to ban people who have not had two doses of a so-called “Covid vaccine” from going outside under specific circumstances.

The order is titled Public Health (COVID-19 Additional Restrictions for Delta Outbreak) Order (No 2) Amendment (No 7) Order 2021 and falls under the Public Health Act 2010.

Dated and signed by Hazzard on September 10, 2021, it is a repeal/update of the Public Health (COVID-19 Additional Restrictions for Delta Outbreak) Order (No 2) 2021, dated August 20, 2021.

It contains many silly clauses which should frankly be laughed out of court. Similar to legislation recently passed in South Australia, it goes into great detail regarding singing and dancing in public places.

The growing military threat posed by China has forced a little maturity upon Australia’s political betters. This week, the PM announced plans to scrap the contract to purchase a dozen diesel-powered French submarines (aka the ‘dud subs’) that were set to cost Australian taxpayers around $100 billion and which wouldn’t be delivered much before 2040.

As originally designed, the French subs were to be nuclear powered, as would be expected from a nuclear-powered economy, run by adults. But, and here’s where politics and infantile, cowardly leaders come in, the brains trust that determines Australian defence policy decided that nuclear-powered subs would be an impossible sell. And, if they were talking about lunatics from the hard-green left, they were most certainly right (more of which, later).

This is, after all, a country which banned nuclear power generation, a generation ago.

In 1998, the Federal government enacted legislation that prohibits nuclear power…

By P.J. Gladnick ~

Censorship? The press says: Hey, no problem!

You mightexpect (in sanetimes) the press wouldbe in favor of more freedom of speech. Instead,Politico is not only uncritically coveringsocial mediajustifications forcensorship, they also appear unfazed aboutthe governmentgetting into the Big Brother act as well.

This was the message promulgated by “tech lobbying and influence” reporter Emily Birnbaum on Thursdayin “4 takeaways from POLITICO’s first tech summit.” The first (and most important) takeaway for Politico is censorship, censorship, and MORE censorship! The subtitle of the article is”Self-regulation isn’t going to cut it, according to lawmakers and advocates.”

Self-regulation isn’t going to cut it. In the face of impending regulatory threats, some tech companies proactively made changes to the way they do business: Apple implemented new privacy features, Facebook and Google have doubled down on efforts to remove misinformation, and more. But, according to lawmakers and advocates, no amount…

By Peter Murphy~