exchemist

Trump would like to carve up the world between three strongmen leaders: himself, Xi and Putin. So he wants to annex Canada and Greenland, take back the Panama Canal for strategic access to both coasts and oceans by sea, get out of entanglements in Europe, which he sees an economic rival and nuisance with all its pathetic concerns over outmoded ideas like democracy and social welfare - and let Xi have Taiwan, once he has got the chips being made in Arizona. If Putin fights with the EU, so much the better. It's Orwell's vision of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.

A number of British former diplomats have suggested we need to do this. Trump may even at this moment be planning an invasion of Canada, for Christ's sake! I have little doubt the heads of intelligence in the other Five Eyes group will be urgently talking about how this could be done, hard though it will undoubtedly be. They may start by no longer sharing their most sensitive information. Obviously nothing on Ukraine. There is also a move for the EU to provide a backup for Ukraine to Musk's Starlink, which they have been using for military operations, in case Musk pulls the plug on that. There is another system I gather, a French one. De Gaulle was right, it seems, to insist that France should have independent defence capability. They have their own ballistic missiles, unlike Britain whose system was bought from the US.

What? You asked whether magnetism caused gravity, not whether gravity causes magnetism. The answer to the first is no. The answer to the second is a qualified no, in that gravity and magnetism are quite separate things. However it is true that the convective circulation in the Earth’s core is believed to be responsible for the magnetic field of the Earth. Convection is driven by density differences, that lead to differences in buoyancy under the influence of gravity. So without gravity there would be no convection and no magnetic field.

Because of your stupid answers. How do either house or phone prices cause the disappearance (your term) of an entire class in society?

Yes, the good thing (if there is anything "good" about this disaster) is this shows German people are alive to the seriousness of the sudden switch in alliances. We will all (and I mean the UK and Norway plus the EU) need to put our hand in our pocket to fund a rapid rearmament of Europe. Taxes must rise and we need a lot more of those excellent German panzers. Not only to help Ukraine but to defend the eastern boundary of the EU, especially Poland and the Baltics. The USA is no longer an ally and could easily become the enemy, at least in terms of intelligence sharing and cyber warfare. We have to kick the US out of the Five Eyes system. Anything we tell them may go straight to Moscow.

Yes, it is a recipe for war: war between the EU and the USA. And war between Canada and the USA as well: let's not forget Trump wants to annex Canada, having crushed it economically. Trudeau's speech makes crystal clear that that is not a joke. Trump means it. Trump seems to be engaged in deliberately wrecking relations with all the other members of the Western alliance. It looks as if his idea is to remake the globe into Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four power blocs: Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania. Europe has certainly got the message it is on its own now. As has Canada.

How is that evidence that the "middle class", whatever definition of it you have in mind, is "disappearing"? And what has any of this to do with supposed "liberals"?

This seems to be question-begging. Where have these (at least partly false) statements been “denied”? But what do you mean by “middle class”? Do you mean what we used to call lower class or working class? In other words people that do predominantly manual or “blue collar” , or otherwise poorly paid jobs? Or do you mean what in the UK we mean by middle class, which is the class above the aforementioned, predominantly professional, managerial, university educated? Whichever it is, what makes you think it is disappearing? I don’t see any evidence that either group is. I don’t know what you mean by “liberal” in this context either, so you should not take my reply to the OP to be agreement to being classed as one, whatever it may be.

I can't speak for others but I've now had enough of this. Every time we try to explain something, you move the goalposts back to something earlier in history and claim you can't understand what we are saying because of this earlier issue, which you had not previously raised. That makes it impossible to progress. You also claim to be unable to understand the references we provide. Yet it is clear you are not an idiot. I do not think you are posting in good faith. I think you are abusing our goodwill, time and effort to jerk us around. I'm out.

This was all a load of overblown cobblers talked up by media hype and it was in the press in 2016, not last year. Many of the transactions "revealed" were perfectly legal, though certainly a number were due to tax evasion. As far as David Cameron's father was concerned, he was a stockbroker (not in itself anything remotely shady) who set up a company, offshore from the UK, for people wishing to invest in dollar denominated shares. That's all. It was perfectly legal and above board.

Here's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55662-4 Sadly it is written in the usual, almost unreadable, style of so many papers these days, but the graph of the decay curve they obtained, from their measurement of samples, was interesting: Fig. 2: 10Be concentration vs. age measured in crust VA13/2-237KD. The bump is the anomaly. This graph suggests they can use ¹⁰Be for dating up to 14Myr or so (except obviously where the flat bit is, from ~8-10Myr).

Don't if you have seen this (or can read the poor copy) but there is a lot of this kind of thing circulating in the UK right now Oh there will be plenty of MAGA groups happy to make these threats, I've no doubt. And nobody will be able to pinpoint who, precisely, has suggested which politicians to threaten. The next step will be to threaten judges on the same basis.

Oooh, so it’s that ghastly Ayn Rand woman! Now why does that not surprise me?😉 She’s the one who advocated a philosophy of personal selfishness, thought millionaires were heroes and social welfare was an abomination…..and then spent her declining years living on, er, state social welfare benefits. So a thoroughly poisonous individual - and a hypocrite to boot. Oddly enough, I don’t feel motivated to read her effusions. But then, I was brought up with a Christian ethical system, of which Ayn Rand’s ideas are the absolute antithesis.

I see there are now reports that Hegseth has told the US Military Cyber Command to stop all work on the Russian target, and that analysts have been not to report, or follow up reports, of Russian threats. Can anyone corroborate this? If true, it can only be because Trump has received assurances from Putin that the USA is no longer going to be a target for Russian cyber activity. This would leave Russia free to focus on Europe. No doubt we in Europe can look forward to more undersea cable-cutting, placing of bombs in airfreight, mysterious fires at factories and cyber attacks on social services and power networks. While Trump and Vance laugh and cheer from the sidelines.

Who is the writer and what are his or her credentials on the subject?

I love it! That would be a masterstroke of very Chinese, face-saving, denial! 😁 Is "Silicon Shield" a thing, in Taiwanese politics? It's a neat image.

Yes you may be right there. But why do all these other guys like Vance also go along with the Putin love-in? There has to be some kind of ideology, surely?

Aha, thanks for the extra background. But this will mean Taiwan will be well aware of the value of what they have and won't part with it in a hurry, at least. Maybe, given the behaviour of the Trump administration TSMC would be wise to find reason to drag its feet over the Arizona plant. Because getting that operational for the top product lines could mean the end of Taiwan as an independent country. May even be worth having a major industrial "accident".

Agreed. One feels in particular that Musk and Trump must fall out before long. Musk's habit of giving peremptory, high-handed orders steals Trump's thunder. Also, there's a basic conflict between the populist far-right (Bannonists?) and the tech-oligarch, low tax fraternity (Muskies?), which must come to the fore when the DOGE cuts start to bite for ordinary people. So unless by then Trump feels he no longer has to worry about either elections or popular approval more generally, that must lead to friction. Back on the Foreign policy topic, I read a piece last week by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times that highlighted the implications of the Trump worldview as applied to the Pacific. If I were Taiwanese I would be very worried now. Trump sees the world as a carve-up into spheres of influence of 3 strongmen: himself, Putin and Xi. While China is seen as an economic adversary, it would be very Trumpy to propose a "deal" in which Trump agrees not to come to the aid of Taiwan, in exchange for some rebalancing of trade, access to processed lithium and/or rare earths, or something. The sole strategic interest Trump has in Taiwan is that it has, in TSMC, a unique semiconductor supplier, providing a lot of the high end chips advanced IT hardware requires. Rachman says the Taiwanese government is coming under pressure (tariff threats again) to sell a major stake in this business to a US manufacturer, allowing manufacture in the USA. Once this is achieved, Trump can cut Taiwan adrift and Xi can have it. Based on the disgusting exhibition we have been just been treated to over Ukraine, this has the ring of truth to me. If I were the Taiwanese government I would strongly resist pressure from Trump to let any US organisation anywhere near TSMC. It is the biggest "card" they can play for their own security. Given the tactics of this administration to flood the zone with shit, it's all too easy to fail to notice things that are not eye-catching but nevertheless significant. Does anyone know more about this pressuring of Taiwan on semiconductors?

You were not wrong🙄.

Oh yes, I’m sure they coordinated the Oval Orifice scene between them. But I still suspect Trump is being played by them, overall.

I’m not so sure. I think Vance and Musk are the ones with the ideology and sense of mission. Trump is just a self-obsessed old man with megalomania and a score of grudges. I think those two are the puppet masters and Trump their useful idiot. Vance in particular strikes me as having the ideological drive that is the missing element in Trump for a real c.21st Hitler. And Vance will take over when Trump conks out. He may be the real deal. That speech in Munich was not scripted by Trump.

This makes me want to retch. We will just have to take it on by ourselves in Europe. Europe has already provided more than half the funding for Ukraine. It's a shortage of manufacturing capacity that will be the problem, and that will take several years to rectify. Meanwhile I have no confidence that the US will even agree to sell armaments on commercial terms. I think Trump and Vance want the eastern EU to be overrun by Russia. It's fair to criticise the way Europe has not pulled its weight on defence but to pull the plug at zero notice has to be seen as a deliberately hostile act, given that it obviously leaves the countries of Europe exposed to invasion, overnight. I think we have to cease intelligence cooperation, too, now that there is yet another Russian stooge in charge of the US intelligence agencies. It's too risky. Ukraine's strategy and tactics could go straight to the Kremlin! And we no longer have any shared goals with the USA for the rest of the intelligence that is currently shared. Even on terrorism, the far right extremists may get tipped off by the USA. It really is over now. I doubt the USA will be able to get these people out of office - even if the people want to, which is far from clear. After all they did elect them. P.S. Seems my take on this fiasco is broadly shared by others with more information about what went on behind the scenes: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/jd-vance-volodymyr-zelenskyy This is disgusting.

This seems rather a waste of time and effort to me. For a start the human race is not going to be a multiplanetary species "soon", if ever. Secondly, even if we were, there is no reason to think a change to the system of units would be helpful. All units are arbitrary and the result of history. The metre, for instance was set up at the French Revolution as being one 10 millionth of the distance from the N Pole to the Equator. Does anyone today know or care about that? Of course not. We use the metre because it is a convenient size for human beings (actually very close to the yard), easy for us to visualise and able to express everyday objects and distances without a lot of decimal places or zeros. And then there is the process of changing units, which is very time-consuming and costly. So those are the reasons for not changing units. As far as I can see you have not explained what benefits you expect from a change (I have not read your long screed from ChatGPT since we all know Chat GPT produces any old crap to satisfy what the user has fed in. If there are benefits enumerated in that screed, you need to extract them and post a concise summary in your own words.)

You are choosing, bizarrely, to believe that the French authorities and all the major media organisations that have reported this nefarious activity are lying or misinformed. Obviously nobody on this forum is going to prove the truth of the allegations to your satisfaction by finding and posting examples of child pornography. If you can't see why that is, you are crazy. It is obvious there is at least a case to answer and it will now go to trial. The trial judge will see the evidence. So we'll see if the allegations are true.