Three cops violently restrain an Aborigine who hit them while resisting arrest

"Disturbing"? Hardly. What do you expect when a known crook hits a cop?

This is typical of the problems cops face when someone refuses to go quietly. They have to use force but what exactly they do depends of what the crook does. It all has to be done in seconds, leaving little room for making ideal judgments. The cops do what they perceive as needed in the moment even though armchair critics might think differently

And this guy was no innocent. He had clearly heard of the George Floyd case and thought he could bluff the cops with his knowledge of it. His claim "I can't breathe" appears to have had no substance as he came to no lasting harm -- unlike George Floyd who really could not breathe and promptly died of his situation.

A disturbing video has captured the moment police officers repeatedly punched and kicked an indigenous elder before pinning him to the ground and leaving him gasping for air during a violent arrest.

'I can't breathe' the man screams while lying on the narrow footpath in Campbelltown in south west Sydney.

The ugly footage shows the 47-year-old being restrained by three male officers from the Campbelltown City Police Area Command at about 2.40pm on Tuesday.

The man, identified by a witness as Uncle Bud of Campbelltown, resists arrest and begins trading blows with police who react with force.

The video clip the shows the arrest taking a frightening when officers begin laying into the victim.

One officer knees the victim while another throws a wild punch at his stomach.

The indigenous man lashes out with his fist sparking a vicious response from the officers.

One policeman punches the victim in the face before he is wrestled to the ground and kicked once more for good measure.

While pinned down the man repeatedly shouts 'I can't breathe' as witnesses berate the officers for their heavy-handedness.

The person who posted the clip to Facebook said the man received the 'royalty treatment' by New South Wales police.

But police have denied claims the officers involved did anything wrong.

NSW Police told Daily Mail Australia the man was seen riding a bike on Peppin Crescent in Airds when officers attempted to stop him.

He was wanted for breaching his bail conditions.

NSW Police said he allegedly failed to comply with the order to stop and tried to flee but officers caught up with him when he lost control and crashed the bike.

'It's alleged the man resisted the officers and punched a constable and senior constable multiple times to the head,' NSW Police said.

'The man was subdued and during a search of him police located and seized an amount of methamphetamine.'

The was later taken to Campbelltown Police Station and charged with the breach of bail, as well as three counts of assault police, resist arrest and possess prohibited drug.

His bail was refused bail when he appeared at Parramatta Local Court on Wednesday December, 30.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9105811/Shocking-video-captures-moment-three-cops-trade-blows-man-screams-breathe.html

Swedish Covid-19 data exposes our fatal lockdown hysteria

By economist SANJEEV SABHLOK

Three months ago I resigned as an economist in the Victorian ­Department of Treasury and ­Finance to protest against disproportionate public health measures by Daniel Andrews that had led to a police state. Information has since become available that makes these policies even less ­justified.

As I have written previously, this pandemic is not the Spanish flu. Data is now telling us that it is not even in the league of the Hong Kong flu.

In May, modellers had said Sweden would experience more than 100,000 additional deaths from COVID this year, with 96,000 additional deaths by July if lockdowns were not imposed.

Fortunately for the Swedes, their policy is led by arguably the world’s best epidemiologist, ­Anders Tegnell. He followed the standard approach found in all ­official pandemic plans, including in Australia. Tegnell did not impose coercive lockdowns or close borders. And no masks, no quarantines. He tried to shield the elderly while flattening the curve by slowing the spread of the virus.

Since Sweden is almost the only country in which the coronavirus was allowed “to let rip”, this pandemic’s true magnitude will be conclusively known from its annual mortality statistics.

Official Swedish mortality data as at December 18 is available at https://bit.ly/36sV3cE . After controlling for recent under-reporting, I estimate Sweden will end up with about 97,000 deaths this year. Long-term trends suggest Sweden would have had about 92,500 deaths this year, so there will be about 4500 additional deaths this year, a far cry from the models.

Note that these 4500 excess deaths are well below the 8300 ­officially reported COVID deaths to date. And these 4500 additional deaths are not all COVID deaths. Sweden’s Public Health Agency noted in October that “the 2019-2020 influenza season was mild”. As a result, 3419 fewer people died in Sweden last year than in 2018. Many of the frail among these 3419 survivors last year would have died this year anyway. Of its own accord, therefore, COVID has caused a much smaller number of deaths than these 4500 additional deaths. Sweden’s average two-year death rate in 2020 will be around 0.92 per cent, the second lowest in the past 10 years.

One struggles from this analysis to identify a serious pandemic in Sweden: just a bad flu, milder than the Hong Kong flu.

When I outlined this to an international panel on December 10, British MP Andrew Percy demurred and said the UK had experienced proportionately many more excess deaths than Sweden. It has, but analysis for nations other than Sweden needs to account for the additional deaths caused by the hysteria drummed up by governments and their coercive lockdowns.

As I have explained in my book, The Great Hysteria and the Broken State, and in my 68,000-word complaint to the International Criminal Court, lockdowns have likely killed two million people and shortened the lives of hundreds of millions.

Lockdowns kill in many ways, including by causing additional COVID deaths. For instance, the Victorian government spent most of its effort during the lockdowns in restricting the movement of the young, who were never at risk, while ignoring aged-care homes. This led to hundreds of avoidable COVID deaths. Australia’s governments went “all in” on a hunch in March on the basis of models, all of which turned out to be wrong — as they have always been in the past.

Our governments also shut their eyes to the data, which has been telling us a different story since mid-April, ending up in perhaps the biggest policy blunder in Australia’s ­history.

Moreover, I have discovered during my research that community-wide cordons have been used only once in the past 500 years: for Ebola in 2014 in Africa. But only “very small-scale cordons” — comparable to quarantines — were found to be effective by an evaluation, not the larger-scale lockdowns. When lockdowns are rejected by the science even for a lethal virus such as Ebola, the idea of lockdowns being applied for a flu-like virus does not arise. That is why lockdowns were never part of any official pandemic plan, nor were indefinite international border closures.

Scott Morrison wants to keep Australia’s borders closed and freeze the virus at a level of zero until everyone is vaccinated. But such a policy is preposterous, apart from being unlawful. Section 5 of the Biosecurity Act 2015 states the “appropriate level of protection for Australia is a high level of sanitary and phytosanitary protection aimed at reducing biosecurity risks to a very low level, but not to zero”.

In 2013, British epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta had shown that major pandemics are behind us because international cross-mingling boosts immunity. Minor vir­uses, however, cannot be avoided.

Are we going to close Australia for every bad flu in the future? We must get back the spunk we lost during this Great Hysteria and resume our normal life as a proudly rational, thinking Western nation. We must reassert our faith in freedom and reason, and end our embrace of the cowardly, totalitarian, zombie ways of the communist Chinese government.

Since 80 per cent of COVID deaths in Sweden have occurred among those over 75, people in this age group should continue to be sheltered and offered the vaccine. To mandate it for others would be yet another ­display of intellectual and spiritual cowardice.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/swedish-covid19-data-exposes-our-fatal-lockdown-hysteria/news-story/673291a65d3ad15d49fe22846c1d60c8

Energy chiefs accused of 'unjustified' electric vehicle sales forecast

The federal government's outlook for electric vehicle sales is overly optimistic because it assumes numbers will spike before 2030 despite a lack of policy to drive uptake and new state taxes slugging clean cars, experts say.

In 2019 the Department of Energy predicted electric vehicles would comprise 19 per cent of new car sales by 2030. That figure increased to 26 per cent in last month's 2020 forecast, despite the federal government's delay releasing an electric vehicle policy and the introduction of new road user charges to tax clean cars in South Australia and Victoria.

In making its projections, the department assumed electric vehicle sales would climb based on existing policy measures and that state-based taxes would not have a material impact on uptake.

Electric vehicle policy expert Jake Whitehead, from the University of Queensland, said without government incentives even small taxes such as the 2.5¢-per-kilometre tax on electric vehicles announced by the Victorian government last year could reduce uptake by up to 50 per cent.

"What matters is perception and even if the tax is only a few hundred dollars per year, the perception is that it will cost thousands over a car's lifetime and that government does not support the technology," said Dr Whitehead, a lead author on transport for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Electric Vehicle Council chief executive Behyad Jafari said there was "nothing to justify the projections that the electric vehicle market is going to grow like that in Australia".

He said the 2019 estimate was replaced by different projections that were consistent with modelling by the Commonwealth Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE).

"The BITRE numbers which say electric vehicles will be 26 per cent of new car sales by 2030 also assumed they would be 1.4 per cent by 2020, but currently we are at just 0.7 per cent," he said. "It shows the government is just finding numbers to make the projections work for them."

Dr Whitehead said electric vehicle sales could remain low unless manufacturers brought a wider range of cheaper models to Australia.

He warned car makers may run out their end-of-line petrol models in Australia while they ramp up sales of electric vehicles in more attractive markets.

Many major manufacturers plan to phase out petrol and diesel engines, and major markets including the UK, Japan, France and Germany will ban their sale between 2025 and 2030, while the US offers a $7500 tax rebate for electric vehicles.

Falling transport sector emissions are a significant element of Australia's efforts to satisfy its global climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/energy-chiefs-accused-of-unjustified-electric-vehicle-sales-forecast-20201228-p56qif.html

Are cows the new coal? Chowing down on meat alternatives

Probably just a temporary fad

Vegetarians and vegans aren't the only ones avoiding meat, according to Jack Cowin, a man who made his fortune selling burgers and who is now a firm believer in meat alternatives.

"The meat industry is a huge industry but plant-based is the future as far as new product development goes," Cowin, the owner of the Hungry Jack's burger chain, says.

The billionaire holds a 24 per cent stake in plant based meat alternative V2Foods, which is used in Hungry Jack's Rebel Whopper burgers and stocked across Australia in Woolworths and Coles supermarkets.

Cowin says he's happy with sales of plant-based burgers across Hungry Jack's stores and he believes they will continue to grow driven by customers who are not vegetarian nor vegan but want to reduce their meat consumption for environmental or health reasons.

"We sell a lot more animal-based meat than we do plant-based meat," he says. "But there's also a group of meat eating people that are interested in the health aspects and they're interested in the environmental aspects and the millennial side of the population as you know, anything that is kind of planet friendly they like."

"So there's a definite market there and we've been able to attract new business," he says.

Hungry Jack's isn't the only fast food company getting on board meat alternatives with McDonald's announcing it will introduce a line of plant-based meat alternatives called 'McPlant' in 2021 and local chains Hunky Dory, Pie Face, Mad Mex, Fergusson Plarre and 7-Eleven all stocking meat alternative products.

Globally plant-based meat is attracting significant investment and now boasts cashed-up players like the $US10 billion ($13 billion) listed plant-based meat company Beyond Meat.

Meanwhile, its keenest competitor Impossible Foods is also gearing up for an initial public offering in the new year to cash in on the trend. Established food giants like Nestle and Unilever are also keen to dive deeper into the sector and the COVID-19 pandemic has ended up adding more fuel to the fire.

With abattoirs and meatworks across the US closing down to contain the pandemic, the resultant meat shortage forced many consumers to switch their attention to plant-based meat.

The wider acceptance of the products looks set to accelerate investor activity in the local meat alternative market that a 2019 report from think tank Food Frontier and consultancy Deloitte says could generate up to $150 million in sales. The report adds that on a "moderate" growth trajectory it would be worth almost $3 billion by 2030.

Food Frontier says the sector has been "growing exponentially" since the report was published with 29 Australian companies producing meat alternative products and over 200 meat alternatives on the shelves across Australia.

One of these new entrants is Australian startup Fable Foods which launched its mushroom based meat alternative last year and is now stocked across 150 cafes and restaurants and 1,500 retail stores including Coles supermarkets.

Fable co-founder Michael Fox says there are "significant tail winds" boosting the prospects of the meat alternative sector.

"Talking to people in the food industry who have been in it for a long time, this is very much a once in a generation sort of opportunity ," he says. "It's exciting for the future of the planet and it's an exciting sector to be running a business."

Fox believes we are at the cusp of a dramatic shift in consumption from products derived by animals to plant-based meat, with the transition to fully take hold within the next couple of decades.

"For the most part people buy meat because they love the taste of it and it's reasonably priced," he says.

"So our goal at Fable and the goal of other meat alternative companies is to produce products that have a better taste and texture than meat and are cheaper than animal meat."

"And if we can do that, then there is really no reason for people to eat meat from animals anymore."

https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/are-cows-the-new-coal-chowing-down-on-meat-alternatives-20201124-p56hj5.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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