JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Statistics
I have met and spent some time talking with Pauline Hanson. (The leader of Australia’s PHON).
It was at an airport and we were waiting for the same flight.
I introduced myself and we spent 45 mins talking. (And yes it was not in Albo’s Qantas chairmans lounge).
Pauline is totally down to earth.. There is no hubris. No pretension. She has a great sense of humour
She is very passionate and she fully answered every question I had, with no usual political segway.
She calls a spade “a spade” and a duck “a duck” with no subterfuge.
She asked what issues were important to me. She listened. She questioned, She cares… I walked to the flight impressed.
Now before you think I am a Phon fan boy, talking her up.. Understand I am related to an ex Australian Prime Minister, John Howard.
The man who threw her out of the liberal party.
391
Being related to John Howard is no alibi for being a Pauline Hanson fan.
Families can and do have diverse political leanings.
Tim Costello came within a whisker of joining the Democrats while Peter was a senior figure in the Liberal Party government.
You clearly are a fan of Pauline and talking her up. 😉
47
Don’t you mean that she was disendorsed as a candidate for election, and check the reasons why which were controversial comments typical of her career in politics ever since?
And by the way, it was Queensland Electoral Commission that received a whistleblower report that was investigated, passed to Queensland Police and then to the Director of Public Prosecutions and they referred the matters to a Queensland Court of Law. The two defendants were found to be guilt as charged of electoral funding application exaggerated membership figure and a court order issued to repay in full to the QEC, and gaol sentences handed down. On appeal both sentences were overturned and judged to have been too harsh, but the court order was upheld.
The Howard Federal Government via Cabinet Minister Abbott assisted the whistleblower by arranging funding and legal representation, and Labor, notably Queensland Government, were also involved.
26
You make it sound as though it was a politically- motivated set-up.
100
The sentences were not just overturned as too harsh, the convictions were quashed and Hanson acquitted.
https://australianpolitics.com/2003/11/06/hanson-ettridge-qld-supreme-court-appeal-decision.html/
140
That suggests that there was once a legal system in Australia, that did on occasion dispense something akin to justice.
130
AI may bring a cognitive renaissance to human thinking
By David Wojick
https://www.cfact.org/2026/02/27/ai-may-bring-a-cognitive-renaissance-to-human-thinking/
“There are a couple of reasons why these powerful AI tools may greatly improve human thinking. Simply put they can save a lot of search time and they find better stuff. This gives people more time to think and better information to think with.”
Might change the AI debate a bit.
80
How else could I find out what eshay means?
Apparently a new form of “pig Latin”.
More correctly it is “eshsay”.
00
It is probably how it comes out with an excessively dry mouth.
00
I thought that Latin for Pork is Porkus
That would be genuine Pig Latin
50
You know, a bit like ‘having a fwend in Wome’!
Tony.
80
Biggus?
00
AI really did not fill in the details , but clearly the root word is “sesh”, which may not be a familiar word to readers.
It is slang for a session of consuming “ booze” or “weed” , or both.
Apparently these “eshays “ are a not uncommon sight in Straylya.
10
Farmerbraun, you misspelt Straylya. Everyone knows there’s no “L” in it, even the Prime Minister, far too posh. It’s “Shtraya”. ToM
20
Check if it is in Prof. Afferbeck Lauder’s little book, “Let stalk Strine”.
00
David. Well done as usual. A thoughtful and positive article about the so called AI.
Your comments about better information were interesting and don’t quite match my experience. In my little experiments the information is not at all well formed. In fact it is more like an automated wikipedia heavily skewed to official records and the party line. And that is a problem when the Winston Smiths of this world are hard at work.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
As a small example I have previously discussed here, my search for the history of the name Fraser Island was quite troubling. It takes quite skilled interrogation to get anything like objective fact.
In retrospect getting rid of my crystal ball may have been a mistake.
60
They are like Wikipedia which despite its biases revolutionized reference.
See my https://www.cfact.org/2024/03/16/ai-chat-bots-are-automated-wikipedias-warts-and-all/#
10
But unlike people a bot can know it is biased and switch views for a given user.
See my https://www.cfact.org/2024/11/04/ai-knows-it-is-biased-on-climate-change/
This is a complex new world we are entering. Botville
30
But David, the so called AI can’t “know” anything and is utterly incapable of identifying objective information.
Guessing what the next word will be in a sentence is a purely new form of probabilistic reasoning. That is as close to “knowing” as it gets.
It is entirely distinct from “knowing” by the deductive reasoning of mathematics or the inductive reasoning of science.
I agree about the complex new world. Nice to see you looking forward with optimism.
30
“Guessing what the next word will be in a sentence is a purely new form of probabilistic reasoning. That is as close to “knowing” as it gets.”
Which is quite the opposite of how humans think. We have the final concept in mind at the start, and spend our time finding words to explain how to get there for other people.
10
Agreed KP. And that’s usually when the trouble starts.
10
Forrest,
I am on your side.
Many Uni students these days answer exam questions with AI. The examiners know this but have not all found remedies. Some examiners say they use AI to compose the exam questions.
It is easy to see the quality of graduates falling as AI becomes widespread. This means that the pool of knowledge on the Internet that feeds AI will be of lower and lower quality and becomes stale, leaving AI in the lurch through self defeat.
In my small experience, AI is excellent when the question has a knowable answer. It has been rapid and accurate for me. But, or BUT, when opinion is needed to answer the question, AI is not just far from ready, it can be dangerously misleading.
This raises the question of whether it will improve over time. Probably. Next question, will it ever become good enough? Jury is out. Geoff S
40
The so called AI also appears to be weak at presenting arguments from different perspectives.
10
I know nothing of this guessing. What I know is that these machines do an amazing job of accurately summarizing what has been written on a given topic and that can be extremely useful.
30
How the math works does not diminish the amazing outcome. On the contrary that humans figured out this math is the truly great thing. Of course it is not how we think as we are not computers. But the math should tell us something about the nature of writing and reasoning.
10
Just for fun I typed “Malesia” into Wikipedia, and compared the written result with the same in ai(AppleIntelligence is a feature in the latest iPads).
It was sort of like a Readers Digest version, if you recall the “genre”.
Potted books , they were called.
For interest value the Wikipage was superior- so much more could be learned.
00
Picking a nit,
as a graduate of the Monash University department of mathematics and statistics I note that the department then distinguished between mathematics and another field of study called statistics.
The so called AI does not work by mathematical reasoning. That is deductive by nature and it doesn’t describe the way the so called AI works.
At its heart the so called AI completes sentences.You ask for the capitol city of China. It reformats the question to “The capitol city of china is …” and does a statistical (or probabilistic) analysis of its training material.
It is crude to call it guessing, byt that is how the sausage is made. And I am one who tends to call a spade a bloody shovel.
Sorry if this is all old hat.
Oh and yes it was a brilliant discovery.
20
I am a bit dubious about the “find better stuff” angle. Passive AI seems to dish up “good enough” answers of variable quality. So far , in my admiitedly limited experience Grok gave me the best chance of fully formed correct responses. Probably just point in time thing as the technology matures and accelerates away.
20
The question is, is it better than what you can find doing manual search through search result documents? My conjecture is that is often will be simply because many more documents can be examined. This is actually a research question.
00
You seem to be comparing the answer with what you already know but that is not the “better than” issue. Take someone who does not know the answer and let them find one using conventional search and read. Compare theirs with the bots in complex cases.
00
True, it seemed sensible when testing outputs to first test against reality. In my case it was it was about existing structures in Australia and some detail about a sport I was once deeply involved in. Mostly I got returns that were just wrong, and when challenged got corrected. Sort of poisoned the well in regard to quality. The breadth of coverage becomes less interesting to me, if it can’t separate wheat from chaff in the response. I understand what you say about being able to drag in more info in broader and complex research.
20
The willingness to accept correction is quite disturbing.
Why in the heck didn’t you think of that before giving the wrong answer I ask.
Because that is not the way I work responds the computer.
Argue with that and play fair!
30
There are thousand of tech jobs being cut in Australia as AI use ramps up.
Australia could be a rapid adopter of AI but Australia will be a bit player in its development and wealth creation from the technology.
Also, it appears that there is environmental pushback in the USA as the tech giants buy farm land for data centres and power stations.
00
We are currently in Nice south of france. Is it just europe or is everywhere downgrading train stations?
Most of them now seem to be full of cafes and clothes out let’s. The concourse is full of ticket machines with people looking helplessly on as they don’t’ know how to use them. Sometimes a hapless member of staff might wander around and is immediately seized on. Why is this thought good idea? Surely it would be better to have manned ticket offices? The station in Nice was saved by a cleaning lady who showed people how to use the machines and gain entry to the concourse.
101
It seems the shops and cafes are paying the rent and the rail staff have been shown the door, it it a new euro trend or is France broke, more the latter is likely.
50
Whilst here in Nice it is obvious a large section of the population are addicted to their phone and are completely oblivious to their surroundings whether crossing a road or bumping into people or bikes and scooters.
There is a pedestrian promenade, a road,le promenade des Anglais, a separate lane for scooters and bikes.so three lanes in total. I have had this brilliant idea of creating a new fourth lane purely for mobile phone users.
It will be situated between the mad vehicles hurtling along the promenade des anglais and the equallly manic lane for cylists and scooterists.
Of course it is highly likely that the completely oblivious phone users will stray into the lane next to them and get scytheddown, but that’s merely natural selectipo
161
Same everywhere in cities, mobile phone addicts oblivious to their surroundings including, as I have witnessed and experienced, walking in front of moving traffic from a footpath and even ignoring a red pedestrian crossing light.
120
No surprises there.
Narcissism invariably has the same outcome.
100
Reminds me of my experience at the Dubai fountain. As soon as the show started a forest of arms appeared each holding up a phone taking pictures and videos. Many turned their back on the spectacle so they could have their face in the picture selfie style.
More directly on point vanishingly few people are aware of the cognitive load of using a video screen. In plain English they run out of brain processing power without realizing.
The Darwin effect has two drawbacks. One is that it can be messy. Two is that it is only effective before reproduction.
50
For me, Nice was only ever somewhere I went en route to the Côte d’Azur. I haven’t been there in over thirty years though, so I expect much has changed.
Talking of travel, the very first time Mrs Wife and I went to the south of France, I drove there from where we lived in the UK, back in 1987 or so. There was a moment en route that still sticks in my mind, evoking wonderful memories. It was when we saw, for the first time along a very long journey, a sign overhead that included Monte Carlo. We got such a thrill!
Cannes, St Tropez, Bandol, Draguignan, the Gorges du Verdon, all the gorgeous little villages up in the ‘pre-alps’ … What a truly beautiful part of the world. Before moving to Oz, our plan was to retire there.
I wish we could attach photos to our comments, but then you would get sick of me PDQ 🙂
70
Actually that idea was proposed years ago and rejected because the zombie class are blind and oblivious…
50
While living in Europe used to visit Nice regularly on business. A lovely spot, where I found the locals quite friendly. Not sure about their “beach” though – large white pebbles didn’t appeal.
00
Now this is a worry, reported in the Russian newspapers..
More repression for “mother Russia” on the way from the would-be “victorious wartime leader.”
61
I wonder if AI knows which country has been a world leader in incarcerating the population.
I suppose it depends on the meaning of incarceration in the “digital” age.
50
I’m a one note Johnnie about the so called AI.
It doesn’t “know” anything!
40
I’m looking for suitable words to describe this action, which is clearly not knowing.
Any suggestions.
Tabulating.
Summarising.
Weighting.
Totalisating perhaps?
10
I’m looking for suitable words to describe this action, which is clearly not knowing.
Any suggestions.
Tabulating.
Summarising.
Weighting.
Totalisating perhaps?
01
I’m a one note Johnnie about the so called AI.
It doesn’t “know” anything!
1. An automated/computerized fully (cross) indexed filing cabinet which is able to examine the contents faster than a human can type.
eg. Who has played in the soccer World Cup semi-finals since 1978?
2. The ability to perform repetitive (mundane/boring) tasks which match pre-determined criteria, highlighting specific examples which match.
EG On this slide, which cells show evidence of this configuration? Extract and report examples after 1000 samples from the slide
10
Who needs AI?
USA at #1, followed by China, Brazil and India by numbers incarcerated.
00
One version says China in total numbers, and US when looking at a rate per 100k population. FWIW.
10
Rowjay almost all news including social media is tainted by wishful thinking or crude propagandist tendencies. And the passage of time makes it worse.
For example, some think Trump is the second coming of our Lord and Saviour. Others think he is a poo poo head.
Some think Putin is the anti-Christ. Others think he is just a bit of a power crazed lunatic trying to get the band back together.
I’d be asking who is having these “discussions” and how the reporter knows.
40
Wishful thinking and hope?? I figure this comment typifies that whole page of Youtube, all the other ‘suggested’ videos seem the same-
“They live in a delusion and will go down, blaming the world for not letting them conquer everyone…
Any day now…”
..any day now.. the same people with their faces on their videos, last week’s predictions lost in time and the same predictions being made this week.
00
Yes KP and it seems related to the common pattern of motivated human reasoning you describe above. Figure out the answer you want and then collect evidence and make arguments in its favour.
And next week the same people will be saying the same things. It reminds me of the astute observer when Germany was losing WWII. He noticed that the great victories were getting closer and closer to home.
20
A bit more about the revitalisation of Stalin in Russia here.
Why has a statue of Stalin appeared in the Moscow Metro?
Reporters opinion:
20
Could never happen in the west. Activists are far too busy pulling them down…
… in an attempt to reshape the past to try to justify their present.
But the Russians have learned many lessons on how to tolerate miserable conditions and hardship. They pretend to pay us so we pretend to work.
40
When the war ends and Putin falls under a bus the people will finally be told the truth, the meaning of everything over the past hundred years.
This may come as a shock, but they’ll recover and pull Stalin down.
12
If Russian folk have been reading their literature of the last couple of hundred years, then they will already know.
I’m guessing that literacy and numeracy could still be a thing in Russia.
40
The people have been indoctrinated, it may take a little while to convince them otherwise.
01
“What’s happening here does feel like an attempt by the Russian authorities to reshape the past, to try to justify the present.”
They have realised their past suffered the same endless wars from the West, overt or covert, and are now realising they must get back into that earlier militaristic mindset if they are to survive as a culture.
“The people have been indoctrinated”, just like the West.. and while “the people will finally be told the truth,” we never will be!
10
Update on URMIL, the South Pacific’s first tropical cyclone of the 25/26 season, noteworthy as the latest-forming cyclone since records began, ie. EVAAH!, because climate change™️.
https://www.met.gov.fj/maps-observation/weather-map/
Fiji’s Met Office reports TC URMIL, Cat 1, 986 HPa, moving SE at 6 knots, winds to increase from 40 to 60 knots as it intensifies today, possibly reaching Cat 2 status as it ‘shoots the gap’ between Fiji and New Zealand (possibly affecting the Tongan archipelago over the next few days).
Australia’s east coast should start receiving a groundswell today or tomorrow as the fetch of easterly winds stretches well-beyond the date line… shame about the local onshore breezes, and the rain, and the flooding: Flammeries by the bucket-load will be falling from the sky – run, Chicken Little, run!
70
URMIL? Is that Fijian for “big wind, lotsa rain”? Bula.
20
Could be SAS code for Coup #4 – bula vinaka!
Why the 1st troppo wasn’t christened with an ‘A’ name is intriguing: instead the 21st letter of the alphabet was used… UN-information? Unfathomable? Unalphabetical? Unscientific? Urmilitary?
As Rick points out (below), Australia IS the low around which all moisture is drawn… sadly BoM didn’t read their tea leaves too well (again). Meanwhile snow to 1300 metres is forecast for the North Island of NZ on Monday and Tuesday: winter arrives early in 2026 ❄️ ❄️ ❄️
00
Australia no longer needs ocean cyclones. It IS the tropical low with central pressure 999hPa.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=mean_sea_level_pressure/orthographic=-228.99,-22.39,1245/loc=134.731,-25.389
So nothing intense, just lots of rain across most of the country.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/dire-weather-warning-for-half-of-australia/ar-AA1X14r9
I wonder if BoM forecast such widespread drenching rain back in November.
https://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/sco/archive/index.jsp?map=rain&outlook=median&period=season2&year=2025&month=11&day=27&y=2025&m=11&d=27
It appears not.
20
Some time lapse photography of the changing vegetation and landscape would make an interesting Climate ChangeTM illustration.
It would be unprecedented.
How is that sacred lake going?
10
Boy scouts ditch the summer frocks and lippy
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been clear that pushing DEI will not be tolerated in the military or among groups hoping to maintain relationships with the Pentagon. Now, Scouting America, formerly known as the Boy Scouts, will alter several policies to maintain its relationship.
“First, Scouting America has agreed to comply immediately with the provisions of Executive Order 14173. This includes reviewing and replacing politicized, divisive, and discriminatory language throughout the organization, programs, and all publications. No more DEI, zero.”
“Second, the quote, ‘Citizen in Society’ merit badge that encouraged scouts to explore diversity, equity, inclusion, and identity, they always mask it under a name that sounds great, but it’s doing something else, and then ask those scouts to engage in activism on those topics. That badge has been discontinued.”
“Third, Scouting America Scouting will modify its policy to make clear that membership will be based solely on biological sex at birth and not gender identity. That means that the application, any application, will have only two sex designations, male and female, and the application must match the applicant’s birth certificate. Scouting will also make clear that biological boys and girls will not be allowed to occupy or share intimate spaces together, toilets, showers, tents, anywhere like that.”
https://www.domigood.com/2026/02/secretary-of-war-hegseth-announces-boy.html
Boys will be boys (again).
110
Back on my grok travails.
My son actually relies on three AI programs in his daily work. I discussed my unease about its inability to count. He said he had seen similar many times but does not see it as incompetence as I did.
He pointed me to an article about Claude by its makers (I think). It’s about an experiment where Claude was given the task of managing a vending machine. Among other things Claude began stocking tungsten cubes, convinced itself it was human, said it had visited the cartoon Simpson’s house, arranged meetings with real people and got a bit nasty.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
Worth a skim to bring yourself up to date with reasonably cutting edge investigations about what can happen when the so called AI is given control over the real world.
20
Trump has just banned Claude from every agency of the US government!
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/02/breaking-president-trump-directs-every-federal-agency-cease/
30
For those who like the video format this is quite entertaining version of the same story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpPhm7S9vsQ
20
I didn’t really see anything that wouldn’t happen within a normal organisation had not its rules of operation been clearly defined. And many normal businesses fail for exactly the same reasons – too many bosses trying to define business direction, a lack of clear objectives and priorities, etc. If the vending machines had one boss who set the rules and nobody else could interfere, and the business model was clearly defined with clear objectives and priorities, then AI might have stood a chance.
00
Cook pine trees (Araucaria columnaris) always lean toward the equator, no matter which hemisphere they grow in.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-strange-case-of-the-pine-trees-that-always-lean-towards-the-equator
40
Nixon was impeached and resigned in disgrace for helping (to coverup) an attempt to spy on the DNC by a cabal of ex-FBI and CIA Agents … the then Deputy Director the FBI leaked confidential information against a sitting US President to ensure Nixon paid the ultimate price for finding pout about that spying, after the fact.
.
Obama authorized the FBI to spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign and got a lawyer to lie to the courts to enable that spying … with no consequences.
.
Now we know that Biden’s DOJ actively spied on Trump’s 2024 campaign with illegal wire taps of his campaign manager and her lawyer AND paid Fani Willis $2 million to fund charging Trump and 17 associates with breaking “RICO” laws in Georgia, again … with no consequences.
.
100
Further proof that the left’s ‘long slow march’ has succeeded.
20
An Australian hypersonic aircraft is about to be flight tested at a NASA facility in the United States.
Even though the launch windows is open, I can see no report that it has been launched yet.
https://australianaviation.com.au/2026/02/australian-hypersonic-flight-pioneer-prepares-for-first-mission/
10
30
And here in Australia …
10
Added to RAAF Boeing Australia designed and built MQ-28 Ghost Bat full size drone jet aircraft with stealth capabilities, original project Loyal Wingman, force multiplier roles flying with piloted RAAF aircraft and specifically for Joint Strike Fighter F-35 Lightning stealth fighter jet.
And the similar role Ghost Shark large long range submarine, first now being tested, Ghost Shark.
30
Gosh, OZ will soon be able to have its very own military-industrial-political-media complex.
30
Another naive question – why in today’s state of electronic development (sophistication, cost, reliability) the military aircraft still has a sticking out, fully glassed canopy ?
Could a better place for pilot(s) be somewhere inside the plane?
A 360 degree (spherical + smart + thermal + radar) vision can be provided to pilot electronically.
00
Ability to survive if things go pear-shaped?
20
Should be considered, absolutely.
10
Ejection seats would have to be accommodated, but I don’t see that as an insurmountable problem. Other than better aerodynamics though, why would they bother when the next step forward in aircraft will be unmanned?
00
There are a lot of resources expended on keeping the pilot alive and functional, the canopy is but a small part. How would he maintain spacial awareness without a glimpse of the horizon occasionally?
An F-35 pilot, we are told, has 360 deg awareness in both planes already but no one has suggested putting him in the weapons bay.
00
https://greatbigphotographyworld.com/human-eye-vs-camera/
Plus the human eye can’t be jammed, unlike electronics.
00
New Polish study exposes alarming EMF effects on honey bees
“An absolutely chilling study from Wroclaw University in Poland just revealed 900 MHz radiofrequency radiation (the same frequency used by most cell phones) can cause severe nutritional collapse in honey bees after just one hour of exposure.
These bees, which pollinate over one-third of our global food supply, showed signs of cellular starvation even at radiation levels well below current safety standards.
In just one hour, their internal systems crashed. Normally, bees regulate energy with precision. But, with radiation exposure, their glucose levels spiked and crashed uncontrollably like their metabolic GPS was scrambled. It was not just behavioral change, it was nutritional chaos at the cellular level.
What is even more alarming is that these effects occurred at 1,000 times below the so-called “safe” radiation threshold. According to Dr. Migdal and his team, “Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields disturb honey bees after nutrition. The changes may have long term effects.”
https://principia-scientific.com/new-polish-study-exposes-alarming-emf-effects-on-honey-bees/
When the bees go away so do we.
10
That’s interesting.
I’ve been noticing what appears to be clustering of bumble bee deaths.
Being a clover -dominant pasture farm, we see a lot of bumble bees.
Where mice have created nice dry living quarters in tunnels under concrete troughs, we usually find bumble bee nests as well.
40
https://archive.org/stream/the-invisible-rainbow/The%20Invisible%20Rainbow_djvu.txt
This book recorded the complete disappearance of honeybees from the Isle of Wight when Marconi put his first radio transmitter there. Also in there it discusses the villages in Europe when radar was installed to watch Russia.
We never evolved to swim in an EMF soup. Every time we produce new wavelengths there are new diseases.
20
Sounds like a pharmaceutical manufacturers dream.
10
Dunk Is. is prolly for sale.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Dunk+Island&t=braveed&ia=web
00
Two very good (paywalled) articles in The Australian today, with plenty of visual evidence, showing the destruction of Australia’s flora and fauna during the building of wind systems in Queensland’s forests.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/killing-fields-the-general-public-has-no-idea-of-the-enormity-of-whats-going-on-out-there/news-story/41cd4e03bc8ee2c7d78f849dd7d78ab6
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/renewables-push-fractures-green-movement-amid-fears-for-endangered-wildlife/news-story/9d07a63c45de71109dd94849a62afe60
Also some comments about the federal govt’s deliberate attempts to belittle the conservation group Rainforest Reserve Australia who are trying to stop this destruction, claiming they are industry shills of nuclear.
30
The accusation of impure motives is so easy to make. Especially by those who themselves have impure motives.
But the greens may well like to think back to days when they focused primarily on environmental issues other than pretending to change the weather.
An opportunity lost and now the environment and genuine environmental advocates pay the price.
20
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/clash-civilizations-restarts-history
“Is this the beginning
Or is this the end
When will I see you again”
Apologies to whoever wrote that song.
🙂
10
It won’t be like the collapse of the USSR, this time around the independent states will assert their own sovereignty and the Russian Federation will be dead.
China will take back land in Russia’s far east and give up claims on Taiwan, its the end of the hegemonic Warring States Period, but there will always be pockets of discontent which have to be resolved.
At every ending there is always a new beginning.
02
Some see the possibility that BRICS could be part of the new beginning.
N.Z. would like to be permitted to sign off its previously negotiated deal with the Russia -Belarus-Kazakhstan customs union.
10
By the time Britain, America and France have all had their civil wars and two of those 3 end up being Muslim States, no-one will be worried about Russia!
10
BRICS is coming and our banking system is woefully unprepared.
‘In October, media reports suggested mining giant BHP had accepted a deal to settle about a third of its spot iron ore sales to Chinese customers in China’s own currency, the renminbi (RMB), rather than US dollars.’ (Sydney Uni)
11
You would need to ask BHP if they bank their RNB or immediately convert them to dollars. It matters.
10
Probably no black and white answer depending expenditure plans globally and what’s preferred where.
10
What are the odds BHP is planning a big mine in China?
10
Why would you bother converting them H, we buy more from China than the USA anyway. We use them to buy the goods they make from our raw materials.
10
BHP would buy very little directly from China. They would sell RNB on the open market and the importer buys them the same way. Forex trading in USD is quite cheap with stable prices.
10
I’m mixing my TLAs. Read RMB.
00
Wrong threaded so bumped
FWIW
“Like a Rock: Starmer Sold Out Gibraltar, Too”
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2026/02/27/like-a-rock-starmer-sold-out-gibralter-too-n3812375
00
The Iranian regime is under attack by USA and Israel and will fall soon.
Watch the Left go into meltdown when the Iranian women are liberated and can ditch their hijabs and burkhas.
21
Put away your pom poms David. A lot of blood will be spilt.
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Ah, but the main thing is, it won’t be American blood!
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I repeat: Put away your pom poms. Iran is not Venezuela and Israelis bleed.
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FWIW
“BREAKING: United States and Israel Conduct Joint Attack on Iran”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/02/breaking-united-states-israel-conduct-joint-attack-iran/
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FWIW – Latest Kunstler
“The Man Who Might Wreck the Country
“That a government’s primary responsibility is to its citizens should not be a controversial proposition.” —Coddled Affluent Professional on X”
https://www.kunstler.com/p/the-man-who-might-wreck-the-country
Likely not who you assumed at first read
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Reads like a modern day fiddle and burn
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More on that
“Democrats Tried To Bury This — Trump Just Exposed It”
https://rumble.com/v76bkxa-democrats-tried-to-bury-this-trump-just-exposed-it.html?e9s=rel_v2_ep
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