@ Peter AU1 | Mar 4 2026 16:10 utc | 203
 
i am still using duckduckgo… what are you using for a search engine? yandex? 

Posted by: james | Mar 4 2026 16:14 utc | 203

peter – i like William Schryver‘s writing and insights.. and i agree with your conclusion too..

Posted by: james | Mar 4 2026 16:19 utc | 205

james | Mar 4 2026 16:14 utc | 204
I use yandex some of the time. When I first started using it, it was very western oriented so it would bring up a lot of English language stuff but now it is Far more Russia orientated bringing up some English language stuff but mostly Russian. Excellent for searching or researching anything Russian.
 
In my firefox browser, I just use the google search engine as all western search engines are censored in exactly the same way and everything from all of them goes into spook data banks.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 4 2026 16:44 utc | 207

Well my first foray into rough opal buying did not work out so good. I bought both pieces from still shots rather than video. I am used to watching opal cutting on video. Have been watching it for three or four years. 
 
I have been going through the website and getting used to it. Very similar to ebay but purely for opal. There is the fixed price stuff and the auctions. Ebay auctions simply end at a set time, but for the opal, the genuine bidding only starts a few seconds before the deadline and then the time keeps getting extended by a minute each time a bid comes in. In the one I watched the biding was at around 100$AU seconds before the deadline then the bids started coming in. The auction went for another 23 minutes and reached 364 AU or 255 US when the bids stopped coming. 
 
That was for a 450 carat parcel of blue on black rough. Th stones I bought were set price. Most of the sellers put a a short video of the stone being rolled I round but I found only some of the video would load and play. I don’t know what the problem is but I have found I have to keep refreshing the page till the video loads. 
 
The stones I have bought, the one I thought the better one, very thin weak colour bar on white sandstone, the other, actually better colour but very thin seam from within sandstone. Neither has a bar on the low grade boulder opal I did not sell back in the early 2000s.
 
I think I will make doublets out of them. A doublet is a thin slice of crystal glued onto a black potch backing. That makes an incredible difference to the colour but is considered synthetic and very low value compared to fully natural opal.
 
Anyway, I will have a couple more tries at buying something decent on auction but ensuring I watch them being rolled around on video first that way I get to see all sides and also better guage the size in relation the a persons fingers.
 
Best way to buy opal is to actually go to a mining field and by a parcel of rough direct from the miner. That way you get to see and handle what you a buying and get the best price.  

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 4 2026 17:37 utc | 209

Methane, the main feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer. I was only thinking of it in terms of thermal energy, but the nitrogen fertilizer that is now the main component in growing all our food is just as big.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 4 2026 18:44 utc | 211

Trump and Beria. 
When I was a kid in high school We would sit outside on the lawn for lunch. It was right on the coast so seagulls would come around. The would chatter amongst themselves until something was thrown out then squark and squabble and carry on. Me being me, one day I pinched a bit of solder from metalwork.  about three or four inches long. Would have weighed a kilo or better. Sitting there at lunch time I had the bright idea of wrapping a bit of bread around it and throwing it to the gulls. The early bird gets the worm and first in best dressed as they say. That poor bloody bird that was the lucky winner was too overloaded for flight. It ran along the ground flapping its wings but simply could not get lift off.
 
This is a quieter place to write my thoughts. Trump and Beria are exceptionally dangerous. This is not the America of Obama or Biden. I greatly fear for Iran. The very deliberate targeting of the girls schools and the hospitals. The mass missile strikes on civilian areas. The F15 reaching Tehran before it was shot down. This is not planned as a war. It is planned as an extermination event.
 
That the F-15 reached Tehran means the majority of the air defense to the west has now been destroyed. Soon a proxy ground force with a backbone of US special forces will move in to take the oilfields and Gulf coast.
 
After the Russians helped drive back the CIA/MI6/Mossad headchoppers, the ancient markets of Aleppo were fully rebuilt as were those of ancient Damascus. I would have liked to have traveled to those old Bazaars. A number did in that interim period, and I watched their videos. Iran is similar though the old side of town, me being a westerner know as ancient Persia. That is all now being destroyed by the Americans and Jews. I don’t want to see another secular Muslim state fall. Iran is the last of seven in five years.
 
This Trump/Beria America is an utterly ruthless killing machine and do not under estimate it.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 4 2026 20:25 utc | 213

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 4 2026 16:10 utc | 203
 
not sarcasm.  Surprised you came to truth before going through the “I was in the left right pardaigm” thing first.  Also surprised you are so passionate now when 13 years ago you didnt care.  Also sirprised mh-117 was your wake up call, its kind of a non-issue to most.
 
I figured by your understandings of the world you had spent most your life interested in such topics.

Posted by: UWDude | Mar 5 2026 0:09 utc | 215

Earlier, I’ve floated the idea that the meeting between Trump and Kim in 2019 might’ve been a ploy for Trump to assassinate Kim because those who negotiate with Trump (Putin, Soleimani, Khamenei) have a bad habit of getting blown up not long after, though not always successfully.

Amid Kim Jong-un’s high-level nuclear talks with President Trump in 2019, covert American operatives were ostensibly (as reported by the New York Times) sent to “plant an electronic device that would let the United States intercept the communications of North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-un” to “provide the United States with a stream of valuable intelligence”. Interestingly, for a recon mission, the military chose “SEAL Team 6’s Red Squadron — the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden”.
NYT’s goal is to bring down Trump, not bring down America altogether, so their reporting must be read from that perspective. Were there details omitted by NYT or simply just not made known to them? As we have seen with examples of Trump’s diplomatic engagement with Iranian leaders (Soleimani and Khamenei), Trump only negotiates to lull his enemies into a false sense of security and to make it easy for Trump’s team to predict the assassination target’s movements so as to improve the chances of success for the assassination attempts. This is pure speculation on my part, but I think Trump wants to set up some time-delayed assassination device that can target Kim Jong-un.
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Mar 1 2026 7:43 utc | 960

 
Reporting from Newsweek and The Sun (citing The Times) in 2017 suggests that sending Navy SEALs to assassinate Kim might not be that far-fetched of an idea after all. Keep in mind that the DPRK conducted its fifth nuclear test on September 2016 and its sixth on 3 September 2017, so there is no question any longer of the DPRK being a nuclear power. And yet, decapitation strikes still weren’t taken out of America’s playbook for engaging with the DPRK.
 
North Korea Leader Kim Jong Un Fears ‘Decapitation’ by Squad of U.S. Navy Seals, Newsweek, Jun 21, 2017
 
BIN JONG UN Elite US Navy Seals that killed Osama bin Laden are training South Korean assassination squad to take out Kim Jong-un, The Sun, 6 Sep 2017
 
Note that in 2017, decapitation strikes as a concept is new enough that they had to explain it to the readers.

A decapitating strike, in military language, is when the leadership’s figurehead and top-level support is taken out of play, particularly poignant in North Korea where Kim Jong Un has absolute power over the country.

 
More recently, in 2025, someone from RAND published a piece in Foreign Policy on tricking the Chinese into a believing that decapitation strikes won’t be used against the Chinese leadership.

In a July 2017 internal speech devoted to Beijing’s capital air defense, the text of which was seen by the author, Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping warned the PLA that the risk of airstrikes to capitals had grown dramatically and complained that the service was still weak in its ability to manage Beijing’s air defenses. He exhorted the PLA to innovate its defenses and repeated his call for more realistic training.
 
This Chinese perception may perplex U.S. officials, who recognize that China’s secure second-strike nuclear capability means that leadership decapitation would carry immense escalation risks. (AUH note: Surely Americans are all cautious actors who won’t attempt decapitation strikes on nuclear-armed powers, please ignore the attempts on Kim and Putin.)
 
U.S. strikes around Beijing could prove particularly risky. For example, Washington might seek to degrade the Chinese defense industrial base by striking key munitions facilities around the capital. In this case, a preoccupation with operational efficiency and force survivability might lead the U.S. Air Force to first target air defense systems around Beijing before sending bombers to target munitions factories. Chinese leaders, however, are unlikely to know that the United States is merely going after munitions production. They would instead see their capital’s air defenses being attrited, quickly followed by U.S. Air Force bombers flying toward the city. (AUH note: Just because we’re leaving you defenseless against decapitation strikes doesn’t mean that we’re attempting it. We Americans are the good guys after all and won’t do anything so underhanded!)
 
But even U.S. actions away from China could be misinterpreted. For example, a former PLA researcher now working for a Chinese foreign ministry think tank claimed in a 2017 interview that U.S. long-range strike deployments to South Korea for a bilateral exercise that year were demonstrations of U.S. decapitation capabilities.

 
I find this passage below particularly amusing:

Finally, if the United States ever does launch strikes against mainland China, Washington should at least be clear in its message that they are solely for the purpose of stopping an invasion of Taiwan and are not leadership decapitation attempts.
 
None of these actions by themselves will correct Chinese perceptions.

 
We’re just bombing parts of China that we think you the Chinese won’t find to be critical but we the Americans think is critical enough that it can halt a Taiwan invasion (as if that’s totally fine and normal), we’re definitely not taking out your leadership. Promise! It’s your fault if you misinterpret us! Ignore the fact that we’ve tried to take out Putin and Russia’s nuclear triad and all the decapitation strikes we’ve attempted since 2017!
 
Death to America
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ

Posted by: All Under Heaven | Mar 5 2026 1:21 utc | 217

Three Chinese spent 470 dollars using three days to make this video with AI.
 
With the latest AI model they can have 80 episodes like this in 5 days.
 
It’s the ragnarok of the Hollywood.

 
4-minute 23-second video . 
https://x.com/alfredc51395714/status/2029114496414044314

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Mar 5 2026 6:10 utc | 219

Some rough opal I am looking at.
https://www.opalauctions.com/products/multicolour-super-bright-nobby-lr-rough-opals-1685594
 
A couple of really nice pieces of crystal in that lot. It will likely go far outside my hobo budget when the bidding starts. I have the highest bid at the moment but that will be sunk as deep as the titanic when bidding kicks off.
 
To me Jewelry is for women and drug dealers. Apart from cufflinks for funerals and weddings. That couple of pieces of crystal, one could be cut in half and formed into drops for ear rings and the better one a pendent for a matching set of jewelry. Another piece has a tiny little dick of absolutely top crystal that could be used for a ring.
 
I find that at that site, I have to refresh the page at least twice to get the video to play. It may be just my computer or connection but I do not have that problem elsewhere.
Another here. A single stone. Exceptionally bright, green with yellow gold. As it is turned over it can be seen the colour travels right through. Early days yet but I am the only one to put a bid on it. The color is exceptionally bright but that white potch looks iffy. If it goes cheap enough, I will likely buy it and lick my wounds afterwards.
https://www.opalauctions.com/products/extremely-bright-striking-colours-on-untouched-coocran-rough-opal-1685458
 
Another. It has promise like a woman that flits away.
A black opal  https://www.opalauctions.com/products/red-rough-seam-opal-specimen-to-add-to-your-personal-collection-1684911
 
Studying it carefully in the video, the colour is mostly in the sand. Not on the black. That porcelain top though, what is under that sitting on the black? Anybodies guess. Under that porcelain top is where the colour will be if it exists. To be or not to be. It takes money to gamble I guess.
 
Just sitting on a chair in front of a grinder uncovering the colour is far better than sitting and watching youtube vids, but bloody getting the good feedstock is not for the poor man nor the faint hearted. A poor man will be putting his balls on the line. As the saying goes, in for a penny, in for a pound.
 

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 5 2026 6:47 utc | 221

Iranian girls killed by ‘double-tap’ strikes on Minab school
Middle East Eye

https://www.middleeasteye.net/node/434786

Posted by: Framarz | Mar 5 2026 6:58 utc | 223

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 5 2026 6:51 utc | 223
 
my favorite western is quite new,”Old Henry”.  Its early 1900’s Oklahoma.
 
A wierd one is Bone Tomahawk. 
 
I  Iike Clint Eastwoods later westerns,  but can not stand John Wayne.
 
I’ve seen many  good 60s and 70s western, but cant remember the names.

Posted by: UWDude | Mar 5 2026 7:04 utc | 225

UWDude | Mar 5 2026 7:04 utc | 226
Some good movies the UW.  The north I traveled through when young, The american outback and I would assume the Canadians – and the Russians all the same.
 
The sort or blokes I met when traveling across the north when young. Bloody hell they were hard.Well just a few. Bloody Malcomb sorting out the town hoons. Got a write up in the local paper. Jeeze he could swing. Rough as guts at party time. All that would be heard was ‘no Malcolm no…. oh oooooh aaaarrh’. A wild boy. A different wold.
 
Even in the early 2000, I got the stock squad in one time. They had been trying to collar the pricks. I expected one bloke to turn up. Four got out of the landcruiser wagon, all with guns on their hips. Got them to take a look at the cattle and the brands. The head cop says the best I can say is for you to camp here with a shotgun. I didn’t camp there but next day I got in the air and my son and his mate on the ground to walk the cattle in to where they could be trucked. I was there in case they had trouble when letting the cattle out of the yards.
 
The cattle had just settled down and walking along fine when I saw the clowns vehicle coming in. I went straight back in and landed, grabbed my gun, jumped in the wagon and headed back out. Met them on the track, thumb on the bolt, finger on the trigger guard so their could not be any mistake. It only takes milli seconds to snap the bolt and hit the trigger. I told them to get the fuck off their property till I got my cattle out. I wasn’t fucking about. I would have shot them. They got off their own property for the duration.
 
A different world to what I live in now.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 5 2026 7:34 utc | 227

A different world to what I live in now.
 
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Mar 5 2026 7:34 utc | 228
 
no doubt.  My grandpa was genuine cowboy for 10 years, then pearl harbor hero.(joined older than most).. …that i cant talk about, too many details.
 
but he never talked much about anything, loved western, had the tired induan painting in front room.
 
Another modern Western I really liked was Sisters Brothers.

Posted by: UWDude | Mar 5 2026 7:39 utc | 229

…Edward Snowden shocked the world out in 2013 and proved many conspiracy theorists right.
 
Posted by: UWDude | Mar 5 2026 0:16 utc | 217
 
It was Snowden that motivated my interest in geopolitical issues. He still does.

Posted by: David G Horsman | Mar 5 2026 8:36 utc | 231

Following on from his Davos WEF speech and his more recent State visit to India, Canadian PM Mark Carney offers to team up with Australia as ‘strategic cousins’ to push back against dominant superpowers. The visiting PM tells Australia’s parliament ‘middle power’ countries must work together on defence, trade and AI.
 
Carney also said he had come to Australia to reaffirm the alliance between Ottawa and Canberra, amid the “global architecture now breaking down from consecutive crises”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/05/canadian-pm-mark-carney-offers-to-team-up-with-australia-as-strategic-cousins-to-push-back-against-dominant-superpowers 
 
The day after at the Raisina Dialogue 2026 in India, Finland President Alexander Stubb ‘Throws in the Towel’ Declaring Western-Led World Order Is Over
 
While offering hard truths to all kinds of human beings, including scientists but especially politicians of all stripes, about three big mistakes we keep making. The first mistake is that we over rationalize the past. We think that the world worked in a certain way and juxtapose examples and models thereof. The second mistake we make is that we emotionally over dramatize the present. And when we act on these two mistakes, the third is that we end up underestimating the future.
 
Finnish President Alexander Stubb delivers a major geopolitical speech at Raisina Dialogue 2026 in India, arguing the Western-led world order is ending as global power shifts toward the Global South. Stubb says India’s strategic choices could shape the emerging international system and calls for reforms to global institutions, including a permanent UN Security Council seat for India.
 
“The Era of Western Dominance Is Over”: Finland President Stubb’s Big Warning27 mins in full https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZcMo9uCw7E 

Posted by: SN1 | Mar 5 2026 23:54 utc | 233

Continued from my previous post
Posted by: joey_n | Mar 5 2026 4:30 utc | 183
https://xcancel.com/dpratyush06/status/2029262701516734634

In today’s meeting, Putin said (paraphrased/translated): “Perhaps it would be better for Russia to stop supplying gas to Europe now… move to new markets. This isn’t a decision, just thinking aloud. I’ll task the government to discuss it with our companies.” Context: preempting EU’s planned 2027 ban on Russian gas. Not an immediate cutoff order.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/preempt

5: to prevent from happening or taking place : forestall, preclude

Russia being a longtime reliable supplier of gas instilled in me the idea that Russia would never weaponize its gas supply or entertain any other form of cruelty the way the USA does, so the news came like a bombshell when I woke up from bed yesterday. While some brave souls on Twitter have tried to dispel clickbait sensationalism (pointing out that Putin hasn’t made any decisions yet), it hasn’t made the Schadenfreude in the comment sections of RT and RIA any less off-putting.
Is it considered “cruelty” to conflate what the “European” elites want (I’m using scare quotes on purpose) with what the 450 million average taxpaying citizens in Europe like B want and need?
Speaking of, I remember it three years ago when karlof1 said this:

“Clearly, some are unable to separate the political from the economic and what one of Russia’s basic political considerations… Russia’s leadership knows very well the average European has no control over the political process within his/her nation, that it’s NOT in their interest to cease energy imports which is being done by hostile governments and unelected actors. Go back to 2021 when this entire crisis was brewing and review what Russia stated its policy was and learn. Also understand that by saying Russia has gas ready to export puts lots of political pressure on those unfriendly governments and unelected agents to change their tune. There’s also a message being sent to RoW with Russia’s willingness to export, and it’s being heard very clearly.”

Posted by: joey_n | Mar 6 2026 1:20 utc | 235

Yes, ZH is a propaganda source as noted by this posting title written by, you guessed it, a crypto pusher
 
AI Agents Prefer Bitcoin Over Fiat: New Study
 

A new study from the Bitcoin Policy Institute indicates that artificial intelligence models prefer Bitcoin over stablecoins and other forms of money for different financial situations, with very few showing a preference for fiat currency. 

 
Since Lavrov’s Dog [LD] has written that China is into stablecoin maybe we better ask them for the real truth, eh?…./s

Posted by: psychohistorian | Mar 6 2026 5:54 utc | 237

Posted by: psychohistorian | Mar 6 2026 7:12 utc | 239
 
wow.

Posted by: UWDude | Mar 6 2026 8:05 utc | 239