On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Image Credit: Salman Rushdie Twitter Account It is really true the author who writes long novels that are famously hard to finish has join the micro-blogging platform Twitter. Reading his tweets are quiet interesting and yo see that the man is a brain and a thinker. Perhaps you might think that a person who writes so well will not be able to be as entertaining and cleaver given the fact that he has only 140 characters to say per Tweet. You could be right but 140 characters gives a person the chance to bring out their poetic side. And a good writer can say it all in a few works. We hope as well as others that the brainy prose starts to flow. Yes Mr. Rushdie we are all used to the banal tweets that so often flood out timeline. Perhaps now we get to fly the skies of brainy prose and amazingly poetic tweets. ' Today we move on from ontological questions. As Popeye the Sailor Man said, I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam.' An original post by Sociolatte