xor

I don’t see why now is any worse than any other point in time, frankly.

NI has a legal right to unify with the rest of Ireland if it is voted for in a referendum, under the good Friday agreement. So being able to reunify whenever they decide to is actually one of the key agreements that ended the violence in the past.

Amusingly, even the russian government corrected him on that too - to paraphrase, “we have lots of requests to interview Putin, he just doesn’t want to do it”

Ooh, I do!

Honestly, I think this is mostly symbolic - the economic cooperation between the two governments is about as minimal as it gets anyway, and the tourist scheme was already suspended for nearly a decade. Presumably there were no near term plans to resume the scheme, so it’s not going to bring in any more money for the north. Might as well axe the legislation to give your rival the middle finger if it’s not useful otherwise.

I think it would be an enormous strategic error for NK to engage in war any time soon, given China’s military is not in a healthy state, and Russia is busy in Ukraine. A direct conventional conflict with SK would be extremely difficult to win with the difference in technology, even with their enormous military spending.

And nuclear weapons are, frankly, much more effective as a deterrent than as a weapon itself. Firing them on SK will inevitably trigger response fire from the US nuclear weapons stationed on the peninsula.

That one stumped me for a bit too - I think the minimum threshold is 100k, but he had more than that (~150k for the maths to check out)

This, though, means that even ignoring the “irregular” signatures he would still have been well over that threshold, so there also would have been no motive for him to even want to falsify signatures.

That doesn’t improve your take lol

This has to be the most American take of the week

Car-brain plus assuming the french think about them, that’s some top tier copium

Brics doesn’t even have a centralised currency of any form lol.

For it to have the world standard currency, the bunch of systemic competitors that make up brics (almost all of which have at least some major cause of friction with at least one of member) to:

• agree on a name, design and production strategy that every single member is happy with
• have a centralised bank somewhere that is controlled by some (presumably inter-state) entity
• have all members adopt that currency as their primary currency, phasing out their existing state controlled ones
• have the currency be more stable and commonly accepted than USD

Only then can it even really begin to start being a world currency

Frankly, I don’t think there’s nearly enough cooperation within the group to even start making steps toward a common currency for decades

Trump and Reagan

I agree that Taiwan is probably more useful to Xi as a threat to rile up the nationalists than as a legitimate military objective.

I think the real risk, though, is that a mistake or overly aggressive demonstration of strength could very easily force China to commit to a full invasion once it begins to get out of control.

He just has to select the right people to send to stay in power