Week 53

NYT: "China Mobilizes Forces Near Taiwan for Live-Fire Drill"

The claim is China's surplus changed character, now the surplus is w/ the 2nd/3rd world where China is the major creditor. That means China loans its own currency to countries who use it to buy from China. If true, tariffs around the world are working? The proof would be in China's foreign currency reserves.. have they increased?

Politico: "[Newsom] made [Democrats] mad when he invited the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk on his podcast and said 'I completely agree with you'; on barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports"

Politico: "DeSantis has emerged as a leading AI skeptic. He wants to spend his last year as Florida governor beating back the advancement of artificial intelligence, even as it creeps into more facets of everyday life.

'Let’s not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia,' the governor said Dec. 18 during an event in Sebring."

Stepped into the breach or fell into a breach? At the eleventh hour trying to patch up an half-assed healthcare system... It's sad. This must be the true example of putting lipstick on a pig.

Politico: "States step into the breach as Obamacare subsidies lapse.. [but even] state governments that want to help can’t completely cover rising insurance premiums."

Politico: "Americans Hate AI. Which Party Will Benefit? It’s become a common occurrence: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer posts a light-hearted video on social media. She’s Christmas shopping, or she’s talking about her Michigan accent or she’s touting her administration’s accomplishments. And immediately, the comments start rolling in, all demanding the same thing: Say no to data centers in the state. Stop construction. 'All I want for Christmas is legislation banning data centers in Michigan.'

National figures in the party are beginning to notice the anger. What began on the ground with widespread protests against the facilities that provide infrastructure for the growth of artificial intelligence is finding its way into new plans, memos and rhetoric as the Democratic Party thinks about how to win in 2026 and 2028."

I wouldn't make a big deal out of that.. he was actually trying to stave off something much worse (as in good) - the Congress was cooking up extreme measures to fix the trade imbalance. He was a globalist, in many ways, the OG globalist.

"If Reagan was such a free trader why did his admin engineer the orderly depreciation of an overvalued U.S. dollar (via the Plaza Accord) trying to reduce a massive U.S. trade deficit back in the 80s?"

"@meljoann@topspicy.social

MTV died. All the cool, unique artists like off '120 minutes' are now fighting the blandest algorithms imaginable. We wanted a place to watch weird stuff you can’t see on mainstream channels. So….

Fedi MTV goes live in ONE HOUR."

Reddit: ""Does 'drifting' [with cars] really make you take corners faster than 'gripping'...? [No] If it was, surely the best drifters would have record lap times on a track somewhere? Drifting is the figure skating of motorsports"

Watching Nobel Minds on BBC. The winners sit around the table talk about their work.. The dumbest among them is always the economist.. Wah wah wah, yapping abt some shit with little or no science in it.. They stick out like a sore thumb. No wonder Alfred Nobel did not include economics in the Prize, they came in through the backdoor, thanks to Sweden Central Bank. The econ prize has mostly been used to push the neolib agenda, 1997 being its worst year.

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A Hologram for the King.. not bad. China was indirectly part of the story, the movie caught a piece of the zeitgeist (2015). Later 2016 happened, more saw the zeitgeist up close.

Science.org: "Architects of molecular cages win Chemistry Nobel.. As early as the 18th century, people knew the pigment Prussian Blue had the mysterious ability to absorb and hold water. Its structure, deciphered much later, showed the compound was, in fact, a molecular cage: a cubic arrangement of iron ions joined by nitrile groups (carbon and nitrogen linked by a triple bond).

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to three researchers who pioneered modern versions of these porous structures by using organic molecules as struts to link up metal atoms. These metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) can be built with large voids tailored to trap specific molecules, making them useful for storing gases such as hydrogen"