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
How good is it for the DEI movement that the world’s first trillionaire is an African-American?
Although I guess that with Robert Mugabe’s superb economic management of Zimbabwe, back in the day, there must have been a few trillionaires there given the largest banknote was $100 trillion. At least Mr Musk is a US dollar trillionaire.
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Thankfully, Elon is a fully assimilated American and doesn’t consider himself a hyphenated American. He certainly found more opportunity here than he would have in South Africa, and fits in better here than he did in Canada.
As far as him being a trillionaire, I’m less impressed with that than I am with the 4,400 people at SpaceX who became millionaires at the same time (out of a company of 10,000). Including quite a few low-wage blue collar types who maxed out their ESOP contributions over the past 15 years and dumped all their bonuses into stock rather than taking cash payouts. Now SpaceX has cafeteria workers and janitors and welders with 7-figure net worths. That’s a great story that the press has little interest in because it violates their ‘trillionaires are evil’ narrative.
I’d also add that Elon’s trillion further illustrates the lunacy of a wealth tax. Almost all of his wealth is on paper. It fluctuates WILDLY from day to day, week to week, and month to month. During the DOGE madness when progressives were burning down Tesla dealerships, Tesla lost nearly half of it’s paper value. Tesla stock has always moved that way, up 75% one day then down 50% the next. Over the long haul, that 25% gain is pretty sweet, but it’s not for the faint of heart and depending when the tax man decides to calculate your ‘wealth’ it could be devastating. If SpaceX moves the same way, Musk could be a ‘mere’ half-trillionaire by the end of next week before rebounding six months from now to be a trillion-and-a-half-naire. If they were to tax him at a peak in his net worth rather than a valley, he might have to liquidate a large chunk of his holdings to pay his taxes, which would result in a market run on the stock and hurt everyone who holds it.
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On the 10th and 11th of June, there was a Science Misinformation Symposium held in Sydney.
While I cannot fairly comment on the content, as I don’t know what was said, the programme presenters do not look like they hold a very diverse range of perspectives.
https://smc.org.au/sms-program
The who’s-who of the Australian Science Media Centre doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence either. I guess it’s possible there are some reasonable people there…?
https://www.smc.org.au/about-us
Sure, there is a lot of junk “science” around, but it does seem to me that very often, the loudest voices advocating for “trust” in this arena are not really on the side of the scientific method.
Don’t worry though, if you disagree with me, you can donate to the “Friends of Evidence” group, because nothing says honesty in STEM like a not-for-profit money magnet that has to spell this out:
“…A new, non-partisan initiative that brings together individuals and organisations committed to supporting the visibility, credibility and reach of trustworthy science…”
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As more and more people wake up to the junk anti-science of the Left, more and more of the Left are pushing for laws against questioning (i.e. in favour of censoring) the Official Narrative on anthropogenic global warming etc…
Some Leftist on ABC Radio (Australia) was discussing their concerns about supposed misinformation (i.e. truth, questioning the Official Narrative) the other day.
The Left are terrified of losing control of the Official Narrative. Censorship is the only weapon they have left which is why leftists always support censorship.
Make no mistake.
Censorship laws of scientific or other opinions not in accordance with the Official Narrative is definitely on the Agenda.
Australia is already off to a (not so) great start with banning of access to under 16’s of social media, people in their formative years, who are not allowed to have social media accounts and therefore are not exposed to alternative opinions outside what their communist “teachers” indoctrinate them into at “school”. The Official Narrative is the only one they can now easily access.
Also, political conservatives are regularly banned from coming to Australia on speaking tours.
The Australian Senate also had an inquiry into “misinformation” and “disinformation”.
Thankfully, I don’t think its recommendations were formally adopted. Although they’ll probably creep in anyway.
ABC News article:
Official Report: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Information_Integrity_on_Climate_Change_and_Energy/ClimateIntegrity/Report
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They want us to believe only what they believe.
No thanks.
Some of those idiots believe that a man can get pregnant!
And they’re saying we should trust the science? Make sense of that if you can.
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How can Australia tackle the scourge of online bots and trolls, and orchestrated disinformation campaigns …
Oh, that’s too easy. For a start shut down the ABC. Second test every “scientist” and academic on the public payroll for knowledge, understanding and application of the scientific method. Third use the emerging “AI” to review all publicly funded publications and statements for misinformation and disinformation, and automatically name and shame those responsible.
The authors of the senate select committee and the public serpents who wrote their report will do for starters.
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Yes, with people like this in a prominent position-
“Dr Alan Finkel AC founded biotech company Axon Instruments and edtech company Stile Education… co-founded Cosmos Magazine and has written two books, Getting to Zero, and Powering Up.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear silence from Sydney and not screaming raging arguments between scientists on opposite sides of the global warming argument. I figure everyone there was on the same page and no-one was going to question CO2’s role in the narrative.
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My current computer printer is a Brother MFC-J4540DW.
It has the longest lasting cartridges of any printer I have ever owned and its operation is trouble-free.
So…I recommended my friend buy one, only to discover it’s been discontinued, as all good things tend to be.
The replacement product had been engineered with half the cartridge life.
However, she managed to find old stock of the discontinued model online and wasn’t forced to buy its replacement.
Incidentally, I generally never do firmware updates of printers because they are often designed to stop you using non-OEM cartridges.
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I do very little printing, and the vast majority doesn’t need colour, so I bought a cheap laser printer. I’ve had it for many years, and am still on the original toner. Much better (for my purposes anyway) than the inkjets I had before.
I think I suffer from PTSD with inkjets anyway – one of my previous roles involved ensuring that paper logs (with curves in colour) were continuous (i.e. running 24/7). It ran ok sometimes, but invariably, just as you fixed one colour, another would stop.
Maintaining that thing in a dusty, low humidity environment was enough to make Sisyphus weep.
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I assume you are referring to continuous paper feeds on continuous strip chart recorders from back in the day.
One of the most famous discoveries from continuous feed chart recorders that comes to mind is the 1967 discovery by astrophysicist Jocelyn Burnell of pulsars. Each day she had to examine 30 metres of paper looking for interesting data.
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Yes, continuous paper rolls, 1 for colour lines charts, and 1 dot-matrix for other text and numeric data.
They were off the shelf large format inkjets, and normal fan-fold dot-matrix printers, not dedicated chart recorders.
Thankfully these systems were on the way out in the early 2000s, it was a great day when we moved to win2k based systems with the digital data stored properly.
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Sick of replacing $40 cartridges (or not having a replacement Cyan at 7:30pm Sunday with a Monday morning deadline), I took a risk and bought an HP Smart Tank 7300. Unlike the Inkjet variants, where the printer is basically given away free to hook you into the cartridge ecosystem, you pay $500 for a machine that sips bulk ink that costs $50 for a set that lasts thousands of pages. Cheaper to run than my Brother B&W laser.
Quality is fine, provided you aren’t trying to print photos. Cheaper to run than my el cheapo Brother B&W laser – which now sits forlornly flashing a green ‘I’m Free’ come on.
I never thought I would ever find myself recommending an HP product.
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The Karmelo Anthony Problem
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https://pjmedia.com/aj-christopher/2026/06/13/the-karmelo-anthony-problem-n4953923
A whole lot of truth in there.
97% of black men and just normal law-abiding blokes who just want to take care of their families, but that other 3% are hyper-violent repeat offenders who buy into the ‘touch me and see what happens‘ ethos and are incompatible with a high-trust society. And when you let that 3% run buck wild without locking them up, their actions make it appear that a whole lot more black men are violent lawless thugs. In reality three-time losers, a vanishingly small percent of the total population, commit nearly HALF of the crimes. These are the people who mid-1990s style crime reformers referred to as ‘super predators’ and created three-strikes laws and broken windows policing to get off the streets. And it worked.
Did the 1990s go too far with it’s policing and incarceration policies? Perhaps. But the 2020s have clearly swung too far in the opposite direction, and the results have been catastrophic for the black community. For as tragic as the Austin Metcalf murder is, it’s not usually suburban white kids who pay the price for the ‘touch me and see what happens‘ ethos and lack of impulse control among a small subset of young black men. It’s other black people who pay the price, since almost all crime (regardless of race) is intra-racial rather than inter-racial.
Lax law enforcement policies have deadly results for the innocents within black community. But the affluent white progressives who push those policies don’t care because the results of those policies never impact their upscale neighborhoods. They are more concerned with being ‘white saviors’ for the relatively small criminal element in the black community than protecting the overwhelming majority of innocent black folks.
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Lack of law enforcement and lack of consequences for wrong doing is no doubt a major contributing factor.
Unfortunately also, a lack of impulse control and propensity to violence is often associated with lower IQ.
Jordan Peterson said, and US military statistics show, that people with IQs below 83 are unemployable and generally can’t be trained to do any useful task. People with IQ’s below 83 constitute 13%-15% of the population and are presumably also associated with much of the violence.
There seems also to be a suggestion of a genetic determinism and thus demographic association with IQ but that is absolutely not allowed to be discussed. At great cost to the authors, this was previously discussed in:
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, 1994.
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Meanwhile, here is a story that is getting no traction whatsoever from the national press.
https://abc7ny.com/post/bronx-mta-bus-shooting-man-fatally-shot-telling-gunman-stop-yelling-phone-nypd-says/19263208/
Can you guess why this story receives next to no national coverage, while the Anthony story is dominating the national press? It’s because the black kid turned murderer in this instance killed someone with the same melanin level. Jonathan Pettigrew’s murder gets buried by the press by he was a black man who was murdered by a younger black man who felt Pettigrew ‘disrespected’ him by telling him to pipe down. Pettigrew failed to identify the vibes the young man was giving off, and paid for it with his life
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Two things…
First the “irrational and aggressively proud of it” is well publicized and in plague proportions except that most are not that articulate. To me it is one of those things which grows in cycles like one of those never ending rinse and repeat circular flow charts. There simply isn’t a single point in the life cycle where it can be fixed.
Second the statistic of “97% of black men and just normal law-abiding blokes who just want to take care of their families” doesn’t seem to fit well with the proportion of absent fathers.
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My local council in Naarmistan is fully woke and charges very high rates (taxes), most of which is wasted on various useless pet projects of the local wokesters.
My most recent discovery was that there is a local public toilet block which was recently shut down for a month while they renovated it.
Now I’ve discovered that they have decided to demolish it, having just renovated it. And they plan to rebuild it.
I can only conclude that they have too much money (our taxes) and have to do more useless projects to get rid of it. (And they are getting close to the end of the Australian financial year so have to “use it or lose it”.)
Probably also, given the wokeness of the council, I an guessing the new toilet block will cater for more than the traditional two genders, since the Left believe in 87 supposed genders or whatever they are up to now.
It’s amazing that our taxes continue to be thrown away like this despite the fact that Australia is in economic crisis and the standard of living is rapidly falling.
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The use of the word “Naarm” as a traditional name for modern Melbourne is an interesting choice as it apparently simply means “place”. I don’t live anywhere near the city but could I also live in “naarm”.
According to Australia post letters can be addressed to residents of “naarm”, wonder what happens if they don’t get delivered, would they be returned to “naarm”
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://auspost.com.au/community-hub/traditional-place-names/naarm-introducing-traditional-place-name-of-melbourne&ved=2ahUKEwj20sSRoIWVAxXg4DgGHdUkAFAQFnoECB8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw2uILs3VsezfK_WkSE4VNcV
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Yep. More invented memories.
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I stumbled upon an interesting paper “Temperature-dependent feedbacks drive the pattern of Antarctic temperature change” published in PNAS.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2513383123
“…Changes in Earth’s climate are caused by changes in incoming and outgoing energy. However, understanding the patterns of temperature response that result from changes in energy balance is not straightforward. Here we investigate the patterns of temperature change within Antarctica. We find a persistent and fundamental pattern of Antarctic temperature change, in which warmer places warm and cool more than colder places. This pattern, caused by a nonlinearity in the greenhouse effect, is observed in essentially all large-scale changes in Antarctic temperature for the last several thousand centuries….”
Admittedly, a lot of it is at level that deserves far more attention that I can spare, but the discussion of non-linearity refers to behaviour when the air temperature is less than -20degC.and water vapour concentration decreases. i.e. the colder it gets, the more the region acts like a black-body.
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Quote: This pattern, caused by a nonlinearity in the greenhouse effect, is observed in essentially all large-scale changes in Antarctic temperature for the last several thousand centuries….
Oh I’d like to see the seance behind that. More unscientific assertions than you can poke a stick at.
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Canada is much like Australia. Gad Saad wrote on X:
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I’m sure she’ll be a credible advocate.
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Elon Musk Tweeted a comment about Apple Intelligence AI.
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Robert Fisk’s monumental book was published in 2005,
“The Great War for Civilisation” (The Conquest of the Middle East)
And when he died in 2020, I thought that was it from him. But in 2024 a posthumous book appeared,
“Night of Power” (The Betrayal of the Middle East)
His earlier book includes his reporting on the ground from the Iraq-Iran War (I didn’t know the Germans supplied chemicals to Saddam for his poison gas weapons)
The latter book carries on from the first.
Good background for the events happening today.
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FWIW
Worth considering
“TAQIYYA: Trump Says Iranians Aren’t Dealing ‘in Good Faith,’ Even After He Left Out Our Ally Israel.
More and more, I’m convinced Trump has turned the Mullahs’ rug-merchant negotiating ploy against them.”
https://instapundit.com/803261/#disqus_thread
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This is the state of the American media in 2026.
Aaron Rupar has been employed by multiple left-leaning news outlets over the last decade. Not sure who he is with now, but he is best known for posting misleading video clips of conservatives. Here is his latest masterpiece of Pete Hegseth working out with the troops (something he regularly does).
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2065477276179857430
which is a slight improvement over his original caption
Nevermind that Rupar himself looks like 200 pounds of chewed bubblegum and has probably never bench pressed more than the bar. But here is the full video that shows what he left out.
https://x.com/PubServantClown/status/2065482301866233909
Yes, that ugly rep in Rupar’s post was Hegseth’s FORTY-FIFTH rep and 135 pounds.
How can anyone consider that guy a serious journalist? Yet because he holds (or once held) a press pass at a major corporate outlet, that is exactly how the corporate press views him. Meanwhile, a guy like Nick Shirley, who has broken multiple major fraud stories with nothing more than his phone and an X account, is treated as a fraud by the mainstream press.
And they wonder why no one trusts them anymore.
Meanwhile, the pile-on against Rupar for that post reached new levels of hilarity with these two posts.
https://x.com/GrageDustin/status/2065774578366910826
https://x.com/BrianBrenberg/status/2065800982756204946
Those last two sentences are going to leave a mark.
Went to high school with him … never heard of him.
Rupar is probably going to shovel a half-gallon of Rocky Road down his gullet after reading that.
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The war in Ukraine has gone on longer than WW1 and is finally reaching its end.
History shows that cutting off logistics to the front line will quickly bring about a collapse. For the military buffs, the loitering Hornet drone is degrading truck transport in areas that were previously thought safe.
I fully expect Putin to fall on his sword before winter.
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Re “I fully expect Putin to fall on his sword before winter.”
That is a bit “Nostradamus-ish”
Which one?
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Tactically and strategically there is nothing in the way of a stunning victory.
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Any news on this week’s upcoming lottery numbers?
My confident prediction is that the people running the lottery have a much better chance of winning than I do. The basis for my belief is that I don’t buy tickets.
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..make sure you come back before winter and tell us how your prediction went.. I’ll stand it if you’re right.
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FWIW
“The Little Girl With Knife and Axe Just Gave the System a Final Whack”
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2026/06/12/the-little-girl-with-knife-and-axe-just-gave-the-system-a-final-whack-n3815880
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FWIW – in the shadows of history
“Why Guadalcanal Was WWII’s Turning Point in the Pacific”
https://hotair.com/headlines/2026/06/13/why-guadalcanal-was-wwiis-turning-point-in-the-pacific-n3815862
But in the shadows
“DDG Search Assist
The Battle of Milne Bay, fought from August 25 to September 7, 1942, was a significant World War II conflict in the Pacific Theater. It marked the first major Allied victory over Japanese land forces, boosting morale and demonstrating the limits of Japan’s expansionist capabilities.
Wikipedia”
More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Milne_Bay
There were some 6th Division troops there so they added to having all ready been in at the first stopping of a German blitzkrieg attack at Tobruk
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It seems some viruses are more newsworthy than others. Last month I had the impression that the hantavirus outbreak on cruise ship MV Hondius was receiving a lot more media attention than Ebola outbreak in Africa.
I went to The Age website and used the search option. I typed “hantavirus” and applied the “Latest” filter, which puts articles and videos in chronological order. Most of the articles are listed under the topic of “Illness”. I ignored 9 News video bulletins and articles about the repatriation and quarantine of Australian passages on the cruise ship.
From May 4th to May 13th there were 13 articles on hantavirus. There are 3 confirmed deaths from the cruise ship outbreak.
I then did a search on Ebola applying the same filter. As of the 19th of May, The Age had published 3 articles, despite the outbreak in Uganda and DRC beginning a few weeks prior. At that point in time 131 people had died from that Ebola outbreak.
Ebola was first identified in 1976. After tallying the deaths attributed to the virus since that year (Wikipedia Ebola deaths table), they have been approximately 15,702 deaths. Over 11,000 died between 2014-2016.
By contrast, hantavirus was first isolated around 1976-78. Since the first known major outbreak in 1993, there have been approximately 356 deaths. It is thought that direct exposure to an infected rodent’s urine or faeces is the main reason a human contracts hantavirus. The low amount of deaths indicates that the numbers for human to human infection has been reasonably low.
Despite the low lethality and transmissiblity, new kid on the block Moderna had been working on a hantavirus vaccine for a couple of years.
After looking at the MSM emphasising hantavirus and underreporting Ebola, l noticed a story filed by Rebel News. Interestingly (in the video) Dr Tedros laments the withdrawal of US funding for the WHO, stating “the best immunity is solidarity”. Part of his reasoning is this recent viral threat could affect Americans.
https://www.rebelnews.com/hantavirus_outbreak_and_moderna_s_crystal_ball_vaccine
After newspapers such as The Age have spent a lot of time emphasising the supposed dangers of hantavirus, Moderna’s stock price has remarkably improved. It had dropped by 80% at one point last year. This recent sequence of events has been a welcome shot in the arm for a pharma company that hadn’t been thriving since the last pandemic.
https://www.tipranks.com/news/moderna-mrna-stock-surges-14-on-hantavirus-vaccine-heres-what-investors-should-know
I’m not offering up a conspiracy theory- just pointing out a coincidence, thought it is relevant after Jo’s thread on US bio labs yesterday.
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ONP FIRE THE LIAR donations are now past $3.7M with target upped to $3.9M.
https://donate.onenation.org.au/fire-the-liar?amount=29
The rate of climb appears past its peak. The money will no doubt help spread the message that the UN-party has been lying to voters for decades.
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