Is Australia trying to project it's anti-encryption law onto U.S. Companies through the ClOUD Act? I don't understand what is going on here.

From my understanding yes, it's in the same sense as GDPR where "if you do business with our citizens, you play by our rules".

First, EARN IT, now this, so many attacks on encryption lately.

For the first time ever, “FIPS to the rescue?”

Related: https://www.zdnet.com/article/australian-privacy-foundation-...

I think only public stuff like archive.org are intelligent clouds. Private stuff should not be put into a cloud. It's possible to encrypt data, but what if the provider suddenly loses the data? I lost an email account once just like this. And I don't trust anything less safe than a one time pad, anyway.