grit...

Scott Morrison has stridently defended his integrity and personal conduct in the wake of the French President accusing the Prime Minister of lying about a $90 billion submarine contract.

cormann

... Morrison also loses his pin-up girl to what sounds unmistakably like corruption on taped calls, allegedly between the ex-premier and her former paramour.

Worse, it’s an ill-timed reminder of the government’s promise of a federal ICAC, impotent, unworkable and now three years’ old.

The PM doesn’t want any type of ICAC at all, least of all one with teeth, Rachel Withers notes because most of his government’s ministers would be hauled in to answer to it. Like a squid squirting ink, the Coalition quickly exudes a noxious miasma of lies to discredit the state integrity body and to cloud our view of its own transgressions.

It’s “a witch-hunt”, “the Crucible” and “a kangaroo court”.

scoMo...

The Government’s booklet and the entirety of its contents purporting to be a plan the Morrison government has adopted for a mid-century target of net zero emissions by 2050 has met with universal criticism.

After weeks of melodrama, the Coalition parties have adopted a plan hastily put together in a matter of days with all the swiftness of an African antelope.

There is much to be said about this agreement between the Liberals and the Nationals, and it is, in my view, a superb exercise in nothingness. Probably the worst in Australian political history is about the best I can do.

By John Lord

for good luck...

In the post-summit communique, the leaders of the world’s largest economies called for “meaningful and effective” action to limit global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, Reuters reported shortly before the final document’s release. 

research...

The Spectator and the IPA have little influence on the "proles", as Pru Goward calls you, us — the plebs who work like slaves and believe in windmills… But The Spectator and the IPA are the primal sources feeding The Australian newspaper and ALL the right-wing policies of the Liberal (CONservative) Party. If you listened to the raw arguments of the IPA, you would still be smoking cigarettes "like chimneys" (not very original, I know) and, by rights, you would be filling the hospital bed with your lung cancers, emphysema, gangrene of the big toes, instead of filling the wards with your Covid-19 cases — and die before your grandmother.

curtains

The [Australian] navy is "very unlikely" to select a hybrid nuclear submarine design that combines both British and American technology, as it looks to replace Australia's ageing Collins-class fleet.

settlements

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday said it strongly opposed Israel's plans for Jewish settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank as damaging for peace prospects between Israelis and Palestinians, in the Biden administration's harshest public criticism of Israeli settlement policy to date.

"We are deeply concerned about the Israeli government's plan to advance thousands of settlement units tomorrow, Wednesday, many of them deep in the West Bank," State Department spokesperson Ned Price told a briefing.

"We strongly oppose the expansion of settlements, which is completely inconsistent with efforts to lower tensions and to ensure calm, and it damages the prospects for a two-state solution," Price said.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

cowcreek

The prime minister has dismissed claims from his deputy Barnaby Joyce that the Nationals secured the exclusion of livestock methane emissions in negotiations over the government’s net zero 2050 target.

On Thursday, the Nationals leader said he had successfully negotiated a “carve out” commitment from Scott Morrison to exclude agricultural methane emissions from Australia’s emission reduction task.

A report published in The Australian on Thursday indicated this related to Australia opting out of the global methane pledge, which is a commitment to reduce methane emissions 30% by 2030 that will be launched at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow next week.

Joyce said the document signed off by Morrison to secure the Nationals’ support for the net zero pledge by 2050 had excluded methane cuts, “100%”.

tango

ROME — After a six-week diplomatic spat that involved a scuttled nuclear-powered submarine deal and a recalled ambassador, President Biden began a one-on-one effort to mend fences with President Emmanuel Macron of France by saying U.S. handling of the matter had been “clumsy.”

“What we did was clumsy,” Mr. Biden told reporters, sitting beside Mr. Macron just before they began a private meeting. “It was not done with a lot of grace.”

He added, “I had been under the impression long before that France had been informed.”

hot

One of the major problem with storing electricity is charge/discharge affecting the life of the batteries. 

The lithium iron battery was — according to some record — invented by Sony to power small items. This technology was improved upon for about thirty years and now many items, from smartphones, electric tools to electric cars, the power supply comes from small rolled up lithium film “toy-sized" AA batteries. This is okay for moveable items, though as the bigger the lithium battery pack is, one starts to need a lot of cooling. Eventually, the number of charge and discharge reduce the efficiency and life of the batteries.

On a large scale, such battery system can become inefficient. And be demanding on the manufacturing in regard to the purity of the material used. 

inventor

Key Coalition-held seats will be targeted by a wave of independent campaigns at the next federal election, with the aim of achieving stronger action on climate change.

Previously, at the 2013 federal election, independent Cathy McGowan led a successful grassroots campaign to oust Sophie Mirabella in Indi, and climate action was a cornerstone of her platform.

In 2019, Winter Olympian Zali Steggall led an independent campaign that hinged on climate action to win the seat of Warringah from Tony Abbott.

These victories have spawned similar campaigns like Voices of North Sydney and Voices of Kooyong, as well as other nationwide efforts that will focus on multiple key electorates.

truth vs justice

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has devised [a] chart to the various legal pathways that can result after the High Court hearing in the U.S. appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange.

Posted to Twitter by Assange Australian lawyer Kellie Tranter:

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/27/assanges-legal-maze-australian-foreign-ministry/

cowvat

No one group has done more to damage our global agriculture and food quality than the Rockefeller Foundation. They began in the early 1950s after the War to fund two Harvard Business School professors to develop vertical integration which they named “Agribusiness.” The farmer became the least important. They then created the fraudulent Green Revolution in Mexico and India in the 1960s and later the pro-GMO Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa since 2006. Money from the Rockefeller Foundation literally created the disastrous GMO genetically altered plants with their toxic glyphosate pesticides. Now again, the foundation is engaged in a major policy change in global food and agriculture and it’s not good. 

fudge

People who present fake vaccination certificates in an attempt to enter a cafe or pub could be fined under an amendment to NSW’s public health order signed by Health Minister Brad Hazzard last night.

The new rule reads: “A person must not provide, display or produce to another person information or evidence, including vaccination evidence, purporting to show the person is a fully vaccinated person, unless the information or evidence is true and accurate.”

The maximum penalty for breach of a public health order in NSW is $11,000 or six months imprisonment.

Security experts have raised concern about a rising number of people selling fake vaccination certificates online.

Read more:

jens

One of the things one finds constantly amazing is the ability of western politicians, or political figures, to describe the world in a way that is unrecognisable to the averagely informed citizen. A classic illustration of this point was recently evident in an interview given by NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg to the London Financial Times (China is Coming Closer to the United States. Financial Times 19 October 2021.)

An illustration of NATO’s complete absence of relevant historical memory is reflected in Stoltenberg’s discussion with the Financial Times. He seems completely unaware of, or chooses not to remember, the assurance given to then Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev by then United States secretary of state James Baker when seeking the reunification of Germany that NATO would not expand “one inch” to the East.