The expense of maintaining both a large standing military and an ongoing lead in technology is never ending and ultimately unsustainable. Where technology is concerned, catching up is always cheaper than finding and developing the next big advance

For governments to legislate taxes and punitive measures aimed at reducing cattle stocks, as New Zealand and other nations are now doing, defies science, logic and garden variety good sense. Based on the errant 'evidence' and PR offensives of third-rate hackademics, the push to cull cows is yet further confirmation the world has gone quite mad

An entirely revised definition of RE is needed, one that sees the acronym stand not for renewable energy but 'reason and evidence'. Sadly, given the vested interests, it is too much to hope green policies will be abandoned before load-shedding, blackouts and grid collapses demonstrate the modern world cannot be powered by sunbeams and summer breezes

All of the immense costs and resources going into the hapless, hopeless effort to capture the diffuse and erratic energy of wind and sun, then to somehow store the slippery stuff, are worse than wasted. Where that effort really needs to be invested is in clear thinking, rational analysis and sound policies. We're seeing none of that -- and time is running out

Spanish mackerel is widespread in the tropical and subtropical Indo-Pacific region, with a population in Australian waters that must surely run to millions. Yet on the flimsiest of 'evidence' and with a blind eye for inconvenient but indisputable facts, Queensland bureaucrats are keen to dismantle a viable industry

Ignore the latest scare campaign, as always intended to spawn headlines, acclaim and, of course, more grants. The GBR isn't dying or even threatened. Over its vastness, across its wide range of conditions and habitats and amidst an endless diversity of dynamic interactions, there will always be times and places of decline as well as luxuriant beauty and rejuvenating life

China must be laughing itself silly as it sells us all that the expensive renewable technology -- solar cells and wind turbines for starters -- to our general cost and economic impairment. There is, however, a clean, safe, reliable, affordable, scaleable, low-impact, no-regrets solution: small modular nuclear reactors of the kind that have been powering submarines for 70 years

If we do not soon recognise and address the malignant proliferation of hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems the prosperity Australians have come to accept as normal may prove to be distressingly short-lived. The damage being done to the GBR tourist trade by careerist doomsayers and their enablers in government is a prime example

China has made considerable effort to study us, while we have done little to understand them. From universities now reeling at the withdrawal of high-fee students to the cheap goods on the shelves at Bunnings, Xi & Co., are shaping our future as much as their own. To not recognise the current state of play as both weakness and warning would be most unwise