Back in the chaotic dying days of the Whitlam-Cairns-Connor government, Canberra was buzzing with Rex Connor’s grand plans for a national energy grid and gas pipelines linking the NW Shelf to the capital cities, all to be funded by massive foreign loans arranged by a mysterious Pakistani named Khemlani. Malcolm Frazer staged a parliamentary revolt. The economy slumped. A British observer at the time noted “Any fool can bugger up Britain but it takes real genius to bugger up Australia.” Australian politicians are again showing real genius. Now, we have incredible tri-partisan plans to cover the continent with a spider-web of  transmission lines connecting wind/solar “farms” sending piddling amounts of intermittent power to distant consumers and to expensive battery and hydro backups - all funded by electricity consumers, tax-assisted speculators and foreign debt.

     We are the world’s biggest coal exporter but have not built a big coal-fired power station for 11 years. We have massive deposits of uranium but 100% of this energy is either exported, or sterilised by the Giant Rainbow Serpent, or blocked by the Green-anti’s. Australia suffers recurrent droughts but has not built a major water supply dam for about 40 years, and the average age of our hydro-electric plants is 48 years. And when the floods do come, desperate farmers watch as years of rain water rush past to irrigate distant oceans. Once, Australia was a world leader in exploration and drilling – it is now a world leader in legalism, red tape and environmental obstructionism. Once, Canberra and the states encouraged oil and gas exploration with geological mapping and research - now they restrict land access and limit exports. Once, Australia was a world leader in refining metals and petroleum - now our expensive unreliable electricity and green tape are driving these industries and their jobs overseas.

     For the many hundreds of  readers who, like me are fascinated by astrophysics and astronomy, today we look at Planet X. Well, not exactly look at it literally, because nobody knows whether or not it exists: it is hypothesised to exist to explain various anomalies:
  https://www.inquisitr.com/5054850/if-planet-nine-really-is-out-there-it-may-be-invisible-to-our-telescopes/
  https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/hypothetical-planet-x/in-depth/

“Although the evidence to support the existence of Planet Nine has only been circumstantial so far, astronomers continue the search for this mysterious world hypothetically lurking in the outer regions of the solar system.
Thought to hide out somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune and the Kuiper belt, the elusive Planet Nine was first theorized in 2016 by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary astrophysicists with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). As reported by The Inquisitr, Batygin and Brown proposed that this enigmatic planet, known as the “missing super-Earth,” is the reason behind the peculiar orbit of a handful of small objects in the Kuiper belt, which exhibit a bizarre tilt in relation to the plane of the solar system.”

     Looks like our politicians are not the only greasy disgusting things in the known universe. In fact, the universe, or at least our Milky Way galaxy seems to be full of a carbon grease that is toxic to life:
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-09-01-interstellar-space-is-filled-with-toxic-grease-that-would-make-future-space-travel-very-difficult.html 
  https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/milky-way-not-low-fat-new-study-reveals-facts-about-grease-space

“Astronomers at UNSW Sydney and Ege University in Turkey used a laboratory to manufacture material with the same properties as interstellar dust, and used their results to estimate the amount of ‘space grease’ found in the Milky Way. Their results appear in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Organic matter of different kinds contains carbon, an element considered essential for life. However, there is real uncertainty over its abundance, and only half the carbon expected is found between the stars in its pure form. The rest is chemically bound in two main forms, grease-like (aliphatic) and mothball-like (aromatic). The UNSW / Ege team mimicked the process by which organic molecules are synthesised in the outflows of carbon stars, by expanding a carbon-containing plasma into a vacuum at low temperature. The material was collected and then analysed by a combination of techniques. Using magnetic resonance and spectroscopy (splitting light into its constituent wavelengths) they were able to determine how strongly the material absorbed light with a certain infrared wavelength, a marker for aliphatic carbon.

     I knew that as soon as I looked I would find something pathetically absurd being done by some university somewhere in the West:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-30/berkeley-students-teach-peers-about-whiteness-and-decolonizing

“This fall, University of California, Berkeley students can learn about “white comfort/coddling,” “decolonizing Palestine,” and making research less “isolating” for “marginalized” students. The courses in question are offered through UC Berkeley’s DeCal program, which the university describes as “legitimate university courses run by students” that qualify for academic credit and can even fulfill graduation requirements. "This class will not be to coddle white fragility, but to deconstruct and relearn whiteness through case studies, speakers, and intense, critical readings."

     Canberra breeds many white elephants, but now they are breeding a gigantic new breed of pachyderm in Australia’s Snowy Mountains – a Green Elephant. Grandly named “Snowy 2.0 Hydro-Electric”, it has the compulsory green skin, but it is just another big white elephant under a thick layer of green paint. Snowy 2.0 plans a hugely expensive complex of dams, tunnels, pumps, pipes, generators, roads and powerlines. Water will be pumped up-hill using grid power in times of low demand, and then released when needed to recover some of that energy. To call it “hydro-electric” is a fraud – it will not store one extra litre of water and will be a net consumer of electric power. It is a giant electric storage battery to be recharged using grid power.

     This is just the next episode in an expensive and impossible green dream to run Australian cities and industries, plus a growing electric vehicle fleet, on intermittent wind and solar energy and without coal, gas, oil or nuclear fuels. Surely we can learn from the unfolding disaster of a similar German Grand Plan:
  https://carbon-sense.com/2018/08/29/german-plan-to-abolish-carbon-fuels-fails/

     Perhaps it is fake news, perhaps it is not, but there is wide concern that the Russians may have a killer satellite in space that could fry US, and Australian IT, the internet and all that jazz:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-25/us-accused-russia-weaponizing-space-due-abnormal-behavior-mysterious-satellite

“The U.S. State Department raised concerns about a mysterious Russian satellite orbiting space in a “very abnormal” manner, according to Christian Davenport, the author of The Space Barons. “We don’t know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it,” Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Yleem Poblete said at a conference in Switzerland on Aug. 14. The government official also indicated the satellite could be used a weapon to take out U.S. systems (like GPS, internet and telephones) in space. Davenport said a spacecraft capable of interfering with what he calls “the eyes and ears of the U.S. military and the intelligence community” should be a of grave concern. “If there is a spacecraft out there in orbit, it could go up to U.S. satellites -- national security satellites that we are so dependent on for warfare,” Davenport said during an interview on FOX Business’ “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Thursday. In 2007, China fired a missile 537 miles above the Earth, hitting one of its own satellites. Vice President Mike Pence called the action a “highly provocative demonstration of China’s growing capability to militarize space” while announcing the Pentagon plans to launch a Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military.”
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/russian-satellite-showing-very-abnormal-behavior-in-space-state-department

     Alone here in my cold Melbourne flat, drinking and morbid, I often wonder how it will all end, and how I will end, although my ending is less uncertain. I am not the only one contemplating deeply depressing thoughts, although many do not need alcohol to do so:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-24/thermonuclear-detonations-over-60-largest-us-cities-fema-heightens-nuclear-response

“The Federal government’s national disaster response and planning organization, FEMA, has significantly updated its nuclear disaster plans according to a new bombshell report in Buzzfeed, which describes the new plans as “truly terrifying”. The report is based on an exclusive interview with an unnamed US Federal Emergency Management official. Notably, the official indicated the new FEMA plan includes preparedness for a scenario involving “large nuclear detonations over the 60 largest US cities”. The plan was discussed on Thursday at a two day National Academies of Sciences  workshop for public health and emergency response officials held on Capitol Hill, and included emergency readiness planning for large scale thermonuclear blasts by state actors, as opposed to a prior emphasis on terror organizations deploying tactical nuclear devices.”

     War in Syria; it was never really about stopping ISIS, but rather, to flood Europe with “migrants’ and to set up things for the main event, a US vs Russia nuclear war, which the US Deep State so desperately want, with perhaps another false flag chemical attack on the way:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-25/russian-official-suggests-deploying-nuclear-weapons-syria-respond-us-sanctions

“The long-running US and Russian proxy war in Syria has been largely forgotten of late, but suddenly snapped back into international headlines with John Bolton’s warning Assad and Russia this week that Washington will respond with “greater military force” should claims of a Syrian government chemical attack emerge in Idlib. In response, Russia subsequently warned of a staged “chemical provocation” coming and it appears a war of words is yet again ratcheting up over Syria, which has the very real potential of turning into an actual war. It fits a familiar pattern on Syria since Russian intervention at the invitation of President Bashar al-Assad in 2015: just when it appears the jihadists are on the brink of final defeat, and as stability is returning after seven years of grinding war, something happens to bring things right back to the brink of global crisis and escalation.

     If readers need a concrete example of the way global warming has become a new cult among the chattering/singing class, simply consider the comments by singer Steve Wonder that global warming was responsible for the cancer that killed singer Aretha Franklin!
  https://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/08/20/stevie-wonder-blames-global-warming-for-aretha-franklins-cancer/

“I just feel that all these various diseases that we have and all these things that are happening in the world in part is because there are those who don’t believe in global warming, don’t believe that what we do affects the world. What we eat affects the world.” Wonder said. “I just hope that people will grow up out of the foolishness and know that we all, by how we think, how we view, how we treat others, we will never unlock the key until we truly let go of the hatred, the bigotry, the evilness, the selfishness. We do that and we can unlock some of those things that keep us in this place. If you read it closely, though, what Wonder said is even dumber than blaming disease on Global Warming. The truth is that he blamed the spread of cancer on those who don’t believe in Global Warming. “I just feel that all these various diseases that we have and all that is happening in the world in part is because there are those who don’t believe in global warming,” Stevie Wonder said. So the pro-science Wonder is telling the world that a lack of belief in Global Warming is what killed Aretha Franklin, is what gave her cancer."

     I have been following the North Korea nuke issue, because I don’t trust them. It struck me as highly implausible that a regime could go from talk of a nuclear Armageddon, to peace in a few months. There has to be more to it than that, surely:
  https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/08/21/u-n-nuclear-watchdog-no-sign-of-north-korea-halting-nuclear-activities/

“The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published a report on Monday stating there is no indication North Korea is truly abandoning its nuclear weapons program. The U.N. watchdog agency said the few steps taken by Pyongyang so far have been largely theatrical and do not represent a meaningful dismantling of the rogue Communist nation’s nuclear capability. The IAEA report made it clear that verification is extremely difficult to conduct in North Korea, so the agency’s “knowledge of the DPRK’s nuclear program is limited, and, as further nuclear activities take place in the country, this knowledge is declining.” That sounds like a tactful way of saying that North Korea is growing less transparent as the “denuclearization” process ostensibly continues, which is the exact opposite of what the international community desires, and quite remarkable given how opaque North Korea was to begin with. Based on the few verification tools available to it, primarily satellite imagery and the trickle of “open source” information available from North Korea, the IAEA warned that a new plutonium reprocessing plant appears to be under construction at the Yongbyon nuclear power plant, while a new site near Pyongyang has characteristics “not inconsistent with a centrifuge enrichment facility.” Both of these facilities would be useful for producing nuclear warheads.”

     As longish term readers will know, one of my jobs as a journalist of sorts here (not saying that I am a particularly good one though) is to report on absurdities in the universities, and I do this in the hope of gaining support for my idea of closing down the universities, and replacing them by decentralised professional and technical training centres. Hence, teach doctors in hospitals, biological tech in biology/biotech training centres, and lawyers in Law Societies, although we have a glut of them at the moment. Plenty of practice for jobs is the theme. Arts/Farts and Social Sciences will get the chop, i.e. Womyn’s Studies, Sociology and related bs. For today, consider the idea of ecosexuals? What’s that you may ask?
  https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1031201316595527684

“A recently published academic article examines “exosexuals’ encounters with the natural environment.” In a new academic piece published in the journal Feminist Theory, Professor Lauran Whitworth of St. Mary’s College of Maryland defines the increasingly popular term “ecosexual.” “1. A person that finds nature sensual, sexy. 2. A new sexual identity. 3: Person who takes the Earth as their lover,” she wrote. In another paragraph, Whitworth explains that while some environmentalists encourage the use of environmentally-friendly sex products such as fair trade condoms and chemical-free lubricants, “ecosexuals” take it a step further by encouraging sex with “nature itself.” Breitbart News has reported on “ecosexuals” throughout their rise in popularity in feminist circles. In November 2016, Breitbart News reported that “ecosexuals” were masturbating under waterfalls and trees to save the planet. In September 2017, Breitbart News reported that a UC Santa Cruz professor was encouraging her students to have sex with the earth in order to preserve it. In April 2018, Breitbart News reported on a University of Michigan professor that wrote about the importance of “talking erotically to plants.”

     I like reading and writing these science pieces for you after a hard day of high school teaching. Usually I am a little drunk while doing so, the only thing that can relax me enough to get some sleep to face the next day of teaching  torture, rampaging rude students, no interest in science and maths, but plenty of interest in drugs, even though chemistry is needed to synthesise their treasures. I particularly rejoice in science geeks stumbling across stuff that they cannot yet explain. I know that this upsets them, and stresses them almost to the same level I get teaching in the multicult:
  https://www.livescience.com/63385-steve-not-aurora-mystery-phenomenon.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180821-ls

“Late at night on July 25, 2016, a thin river of purple light slashed through the skies of northern Canada in an arc that seemed to stretch hundreds of miles into space. It was a magnificent, mysterious, borderline-miraculous sight, and the group of citizen skywatchers who witnessed it decided to give the phenomenon a fittingly majestic name: “Steve.” Given its coincidence with the northern lights, Steve was just thought to be part of the aurora — the shimmering sheets of nighttime color that appear in the sky when charged plasma particles streak out of the sun, sail across space on solar winds and jolt down Earth’s magnetic field toward the planet’s poles. However, a new study published today (Aug. 20) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that such a simple explanation might not apply. [Aurora Images: See Breathtaking Views of the Northern Lights] According to researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada and the University of California, Los Angeles, Steve does not contain the telltale traces of charged particles blasting through Earth’s atmosphere that auroras do. Steve, therefore, is not an aurora at all, but something entirely different: a mysterious, largely unexplained phenomenon that the researchers have dubbed a “sky glow.”

     So, NASA is telling us now that water has been discovered on the moon. What has taken them so long to work this out? Such pools of ice water are relatively large in extent and surely should have been detected long before 2018. If I can find water in my fridge, then why can’t NASA in all its magic have worked this out sooner?
  https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7218

     There is a fascinating area of conspiracy concerning the 1969 alleged moon landing, and how this could have been faked. Personally I don’t think so, as there, is, surprisingly enough (for usually the establishment ignores conspiracy theories, giving them even more edge), rebuttals of this. What I really like are physics bits about the uniqueness of the moon, even in the universe:
  https://www.space.com/12464-earth-moon-unique-solar-system-universe.html

     Thank God King Mal Turnbull has fallen. Morrison is marginally better, but the important thing here is that this is a symbolic victory. Turnbull combined the worst elements of the politically correct left and economic decadent right in one power packed package. He was bad on the Republic, big Australia, mass immigration and every other politically correct issue. However, where he excelled, as a liberal, was climate change, which he championed with the passion of a Greenie: 
  https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/08/24/another-greenie-bites-the-dust-aussie-pm-forced-out-by-climate-policy/

“Though Turnbull is a member of the Liberal party – Australia’s conservatives – his politics are very much at the squishier end of the spectrum. An arch-globalist, nicknamed the Honourable Member for Goldman Sachs (where he was a partner), Turnbull is fairly typical of the centrist, ideology-free conservatives who have tended to make the running in western politics in recent years. Indeed, when he first entered politics he seriously considered representing Australia’s Labor party (the socialists) rather than the Liberal party (the conservatives). Turnbull did not get off to a good start with Donald Trump. Shortly after the President’s inauguration, the two had a sticky phone conversation in which Trump refused to go along with a plan previously agreed with Obama whereby the U.S. was supposed to accept from Australia up to 2,000 economic migrants (mostly from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan).

To The Australian          Jennifer Oriel sensibly remarks that, as election time approaches, "the government needs to present a united front" ("Turnbull should go to future-proof his Liberals", 20/8); but how can this be done? A fundamental premise that still remains true is that the Coalition must function as a genuine, whole-hearted compromise between the Centre and the Right, as John Howard has never wearied of saying. Perhaps we need a new, comprehensive statement from the Coalition parliamentarians as a whole as to what are the main issues to be contested at the election and where they stand on these.  Five points in that statement could be as follows.

     (1) The holding of a referendum on the republic proposal only if there is clearly majority popular will for that. (2) The holding of a referendum on indigenous constitutional recognition only if there is clear public support for such. (3) An impartial and even-handed approach to the administration of any referendum. (4) Firm effort to widen the range of free speech while safeguarding the welfare of minorities. (5) Firm defence of Australian sovereignty and independence in the face of UNO and internationalist pressures. (6) An immigration policy that takes account of the wishes of all Australians and the ecology and climate of the continent. In summary: the defence of traditional Australia combined with wise flexibility and alteration at a slow pace. Let the ALP and the Greens then be seen as fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic

     Earth is a blue watery planet. 70% of its surface is covered by oceans of salt water, some of which are extremely deep. These oceans contain about 97% of Earth’s water. Another 2% is locked up in snow, ice caps and glaciers. That leaves just 1% of Earth’s surface water in inland seas, lakes, rivers and dams. We have plenty of water, but not much to drink. In addition to these vast surface water supplies, water vapour is the fourth most abundant gas in the atmosphere, after nitrogen (76%), oxygen (21%) and Argon (1%). Moisture in the atmosphere varies from almost zero over deserts and ice caps up to 4% over the wet tropics. (Carbon dioxide is a miniscule 0.04%).

     Then there are the large and unmeasured supplies of hidden underground water – “renewable” water from rain soaking into alluvial sands and gravels; artesian water in deeper permeable rocks; hydro-thermal water associated with volcanic and igneous activity; and primary water originating deep in Earth’s crust which feeds many natural springs and is sometimes discovered in unexpected places in very large quantities. With this abundance of water, why do humans ever find themselves short of fresh water? Three reasons – insufficient water is conserved when it is abundant, too much water is wasted, and power costs make desalination unattractive.

     This may be something that we have not considered in the detail it deserves: China has exploited the ambiguous sovereignty of the Antarctic. It’s establishing a clear record of permanent control and settlement within the Australian Antarctic Territory. There’s barely been a raised eyebrow from Australia and the world. China is planning long term.”
https://www.quora.com/What-will-happen-if-China-decides-to-encroach-into-Australian-waters-and-build-a-massive-island-e-g-to-drill-oil-or-to-take-advantage-of-aquaculture-Will-the-Australian-Navy-stop-them-and-will-it-be-easy-1

“Why is China strategically developing Antactica?

     Trust science to take all of the steam out of a good mystery. For a long time, the disappearance of ships in the Bermuda Triangle was explained by fringe dwellers are due to aliens, who had an underwater base there, the stuff of great movies. There is plenty on the internet about that. Scientists think that there is a non-alien explanation, based on rogue waves:
  https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/997912/bermuda-triangle-mystery-monster-waves-ufo-channel-5-documentary

“The experts simulated the waves as part of a Channel 5 documentary ‘The Bermuda Triangle Enigma’. As part of the show, the scientists made a model of the USS Cyclops, a 542 ft coal vessel which vanished in the Bermuda Triangle in 1918. No wreckage or the remains of any of the 306 crew members were ever found. However, the team found that due to the massive size of the ship, the waves which were as tall as 100ft (30 metres) easily took down the ship – according to the simulation.”

     Who says that crazy doomsday news cannot be fun? Why should the apocalypse and the end of the world as we know it, be such grim things, when it is possible to laugh all the way to oblivion? There are academics out there in ivory towers who seem to be having a ball:
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-08-04-apocalypse-could-come-in-the-form-of-malicious-ai-from-aliens.html
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.02180.pdf

“The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has provoked many critical discussions on technical and philosophical levels (Cirkovi´c 2013 ´ ). It is much debated whether contact with ETI would benefit or harm humanity (Baum et al. 2011; Shostak 2014; Brin 2014; Billingham & Benford 2014), and whether mankind should (Benford 2014; Gertz 2016b) or should not (Zaitsev 2011; Vakoch 2016) keep quiet in order to protect Earth from threats, or even “cloak” our planet using lasers to compensate for Earth’s transit signatures (Kipping & Teachey 2016). One of the scenarios considered in the literature is the reception of an ETI message through  electromagnetic radiation, e.g. through a radio telescope (Cocconi & Morrison 1959). Alternatively, a message might be found in the form of, or through, an alien probe, as first suggested by Bracewell (1960). It was suggested to search the solar system for non-terrestrial artifacts (Papagiannis 1995; Tough & Lemarchand 2004; Haqq-Misra & Kopparapu 2012), particularly for starships (Martin & Bond 1980) in addition to classical SETI (Gertz 2016a).

     Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has become a money magnet for those with green political agendas. The climax of this green racket was the sudden dumping of $443 million by the Australian Government into a small foundation controlled by big businesses and groups committed to one side of the man-made global warming debate.This gigantic green gift is designed to polish the green electoral credentials of the embattled Turnbull government but has prompted an Inquiry by the Australian Senate. Naturally the ALP Opposition wants the money returned so they can re-use it to buy green votes for themselves when they take power.

     The Great Barrier Reef Foundation (whose Brisbane office is far from the Reef) has a huge board whose members have current or past ties to Commonwealth Bank, BHP, Esso, University of Queensland, Boeing, Qantas, Shell, Rio Tinto, Peabody Energy, Origin Energy, AGL, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Queensland Ballet, Suncorp, UNICEF and James Cook University. All are infected with the green religion or see it in their interests to polish their green halo. There is even an Al-Gore-trained climate alarmist on the board, plus a Director of Tilt Renewables Limited and a Partner of Affirmative Investment Management, the world’s first dedicated green bond fund management company.