Trump capitulates to Iran, calls a ceasefire. The capitulates to Israel, restarting the assault. Then demands another ceasefire. Then new fighting. Then ceasefire.

And, of course, the whole time it’s good news for the markets which only go up

Who can blame them?

Speaking to Mozambique’s President Daniel Chapo ​in Beijing on Tuesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged support for the continent and its development needs, according to a state media read-out that did not mention Lai’s cancelled visit to Eswatini.

Lai, in a post on his Facebook page, said China’s “suppressive actions” demonstrate the threat that authoritarian states pose to the international order, ​peace, and stability.

Couldn’t he just fly commercial?

I do think it’s curious to hear the Taiwanese President insist their airplanes have an unmitigated right to fly over African airspace, given how many times I’ve heard Taiwanese-aligned press scream bloody murder over China violating Taiwanese airspace.

Even funnier to post this on Facebook, a website that’s made a mint squelching dissent on behalf of its political sponsors.

Maybe do what every other country does when they want an African national leader (or Tech Company CEO) to bend their way. Bribe them.

Or bomb them, if you’re in the US/Israel bloc.

That would drag the rest of the EU immediately, and nobody else actually wants a shooting war with Russia

During the extreme heatwaves that sweltered large parts of Spain and Greece last summer, local solar farms saw “significant output dips” exactly when air-conditioning demand was peaking.

“We tracked instances where surface temperatures on panels hit 65°C, leading to a nearly 20 per cent drop in theoretical capacity,” Vergini says.

Last year, intense heat struck large swathes of Europe – including usually cool Finland, which endured three straight weeks of 30°C temperatures. Further south, Europeans struggled under temperatures exceeding 40°C, pushing dozens of nations into drought.

Yikes

With no farming subsidies, there’s a strong economic incentive to travel to where it exists.

Similarly, with no voting rights, the territory becomes ripe for exploitation.

I mean, the million dollar question is whether Ukrainian citizens will have unfettered rights to travel and work in other EU countries. Atm, the page won’t load so it’s hard to tell.

Now would be an amazing time to take a deep dive into the domestic politics of the Philippines and how the prior President’s trial for crimes against humanity is going.

Duterte, who governed the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, was surrendered to the ICC in March last year over his sweeping anti-narcotics crackdown that Philippine police acknowledged killed more than 6,000 suspects, though rights groups put the true toll as high as 30,000.

At pre-trial hearings that began in February, Duterte was accused of three counts of crimes against humanity – covering murder and, in one count, attempted murder – as “an indirect co-perpetrator” who had conspired with police to kill drug war victims.

Prosecutors pointed to the notorious Davao Death Squad – a shadowy group long accused of carrying out extrajudicial killings in Duterte’s southern home city – saying he had “personally selected some of the targets” as mayor and later as president, and had told police whom to take out, with cash rewards as incentives.

Among the atrocities he was accused of was encouraging officers not to spare even children.

Oh well, anyway. Try not to think to hard about the parallels between The Philippines and Israel.

I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine.

There was a bit that Conan O’Brian used to do back when he had a late-night show. He’d go out and do Man-On-The-Street interviews in… Times Square, I think? Can’t remember if he was LA or NY. But he’d ask some absurdly complex question and get this excellently reasoned and well-thought out answer from randos. And then he’d ask what they did for a living. It was inevitably some NASA engineer or finance professional or other well-educated individual. And they were all just… in the crowd. Because in a city as big as that, of course you’re going to get this extremely mixed bag.

On the flip side, there’s Sailor Socialism, a podcaster and aspiring actress who baited an interview with an InfoWars reporter, in which she was dressed in a sailor fuku, then went viral talking about how she wanted universal health care and liked Bernie Sanders.

Interview twenty people and edit the content down to the one or two who make for good entertainment. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.

No way the general populace is that stupid.

It isn’t an issue of stupidity. Not like “Edward Snowden” is a name you can conjure up from first principles.

He was headline news back in 2008 and now he’s not. Anyone who wasn’t following national news nearly twenty years ago likely won’t be familiar with him. No more than a Millennial is going to know who Daniel Ellsberg or Robert W. Jackson are.

The entire Wikileaks project has been more or less obliterated.

I also think raising taxes on people who aren’t me is a great idea.

But from a macro-econ perspective, I do question why we’re paying private businesses to do government work and then taxing them on what we paid them. Seems like we could just insource the work to government agencies and save everyone a bureaucratic headache.

Is this actually note worthy or just a puff piece.

It’s an improvement over prior attempts at bipedal robot joggers, cutting time from the last iteration by about half. If you need a robot to run in an uninterrupted straight line for 13.1 miles, it’s big news. But like so much else with robotics, it’s another marginal improvement that gets treated as revolutionary! without respect to the question “What are we planning to do with this technology after the race is over?”

You’ll notice that the robot is segregated from the human population. No journalist seems to bother to ask why.

glances at the traffic that’s been driven away

shrugs

It’s more often the reverse. You’ll see accounts in hexbear-adjacent servers posting “Why Stalin Was Worse Than Hitler” tier content, getting banned, and then coming over to .world to scream and cry about how they’ve been censored by the mean Tankies.

They are authoritarian left

Oh? What authority do they posses?

If you search the instance for ‘Ukraine’ you will see them saying Russia is the good guy

https://hexbear.net/search?q=Ukraine&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll&titleOnly=false

shrug

Hexbear banned me just for posting a meme of Bernie Sanders kissing Vladimir Putin with the caption “Tankies ❤️ Dead Palestinians”.

I don’t care how much money they raise. They are monsters. Inhuman, vile, irredeemable filth. Anyone who doesn’t let me post in their community is the worst kind of pond scum.

“The robots’ speed far exceeds that of humans,” he said. “This may signal the arrival of sort of a new era.”

Wait till this guy finds out about cars.

it would take more than a few terms of them electing normal people.

Who qualifies as Normal People in modern politics?

cuts taxes

shreds environmental standards

sucks up to Big Oil and Finance

defunds public services

Done, done, done, and done.

If you object to any of these, you aren’t a serious policymaker.

Reagan had really done us dirty

He definitely kicked the county while it was down. But a big part of the US Golden Age was being the last economy standing after WW2.

The end of America’s economic dominance was inevitable, as old colonial powers re-industrialized and newly liberated post-colonial states gained control of their natural resources for domestic use.

By Nixon, American global dominance was sunsetting regardless of our domestic policies. That’s why we gave up the gold standard and adopted the Petrodollar as a globalized economic strategy. We couldn’t just import everyone else’s gold and sell it back to them at a premium anymore.